Crapsack Worlds are common in video games, because they give a player a great justification for the large number of enemies they typically have to deal with and the conflicts they find themselves in.

Go on, just pick ANY Shin Megami Tensei game. The first one starts fairly nice for the first hour or so, then promptly gets doused in nuclear fire, leaving a pockmarked hell, and even before that happened, demons were attacking damn near anything, and after the world goes to hell, we're treated to a replay of The Great Flood. By the end of first game and by the time of the second, it seems to have gotten slightly more tolerable, only to utterly crush your hope when it get revealed that YHVH HIMSELF is planning to destroy everything the demons haven't raped to extremes that make the first game seem like Sunday school, and regardless of ending, a hell of a lot of dead people/demons pile up trying to save what's left of the planet. In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, the world is reduced to a demon filled embryo like state, and most options you have to fix things still leave it mostly crappy or can make it even worse. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey takes place in a Crapsack World, and depending on what ending you get, the whole planet can join in on the fun. In short, if its a SMT game, pack a lunch, cause the crapsackiness is gonna be around for awhile.

Word of God is that all of this is because the universe itself is somehow broken, and YHVH's insanity is a symptom of the problem.

And of course, the world of the Junkyard isn't portrayed much better in the novels either.

Devil Survivor takes everything about Pokéverse (already a Crapsaccharine World if you look at it hard enough) and deconstructs every trope it was built on for as much horror as possible. For one, handing civilians the ability to summon demons is shown to have sickeningly high level of abuse and potential for disaster. Second, the mons running around ARE A VERY REAL AND DEADLY THREAT to mortals and each other, and if you don't have the ability to fight them, they will kill you without an ounce of pity. This is also a universe where supernatural forces can literally decide THE VERY INSTANT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DIE, and speaking of supernatural forces, did we mention The Powers That Be are in the middle of kicking off The End of the World as We Know It even before the game starts?

Persona 3 and 4 start out happy, until you find out about The Dark Hour and The Midnight Channel. However, most people aren't affected by those events, so the world is otherwise okay. Psyche. As both games progresses, things start turning to shit; in Persona 3, a demon named Nyx is descending to screw over humanity and there's a cult that starts up and grows in the later months of the game, and in Persona 4, a fog has appeared seemingly permanently, and if you don't get rid of it, the Shadows come into the real world. Still though, unlike the other MegaTen games, the world will still be in a happy, normal state if you get the ending and True Ending in the fourth game's case.

Persona 4 still manages to be the most optimistic game in the entire series. Hell, one of the most optimistic in the entire MegaTen franchise.

It should be noted that pretty much most of the Phantom Thieves have suffered thanks to that Crapsack World. With Joker being framed for assault after stopping a drunkard from sexually harassing a woman, Ryuji having a Career-Ending Injury thanks to Kamoshida, Ann having to witness her best friend attempting to commit suicide, Yusuke ended overworking, suffering from anemia, and barely geting enough to eat thanks to his mentor, Makoto having to deal with the false rumors of her being an Academic Alpha Bitch that ended up hiding Kamoshida's actions, Futaba being a victim of a Kick the Dog moment that had her believe that she killed her mother and was nearly Driven to Suicide because of that, Haru being forced into an Arranged Marriage to a Smug Snake, and Akechi having to grow-up as a bastard child with a Friendless Background. No wonder why this game has a lot of Woobie characters in this game.

Shin Megami Tensei IV has East Mikado, which proves you can have this even in a lush, fertile land: there's a brutal, racist caste system, demons literally live under their capital, and the citizens above believe themselves to be the single civilization in existence. Public executions are considered national holidays. You Do Not Want To Know about the Ashura-Kai and their dealings with demons. And no matter which ending you get, people are getting hurt. You wanna change the world? Learn to live with the consequences.

The Alternate Timelines of Blasted and Infernal Tokyo don't have it good, either. In Blasted Tokyo, the angels' plan went off without a hitch, God's Chosen have left and God's Wrath has reduced most of Earth to a barren wasteland. In addition, God has enacted a plan to control all underworld divinities to ensure the remnants of Humanity are eradicated. Pluto's poison, which fills the atmosphere, has a 100% lethality rate. Say you destroy Pluto; a very short time after, God will send his Knight Templar avatar the Ancient of Days, which is very nearly successful in finishing all Blasted Tokyo natives.

In Infernal Tokyo, the angels were quickly killed and nuclear holocaust was averted, but the demon technology quickly rotted society as the barriers between Demonoids and Neurishers were established. Governments and states have all disappeared in favor of a Social Darwinist world, enforced by the will of the King of Tokyo. Okay, kill the guy. Shortly after, the divine monster Sanat will head there to check on his experiment. Though in Infernal Tokyo there are a surprising number of Neurishers who don't mind their situation and enjoy life alongside the Demonoids, unlike in Blasted Tokyo where most people can barely struggle to survive.

The fourth game actually reaches a point that the end goal of The White is the complete and utter destruction of the entire universe (and possibly even more) via a black hole generator, believing that no matter what anyone does, the world will still be terrible, and only in complete oblivion will everyone be free from suffering. Some players actually consider this to be the best possible ending.

End of Nations civilization has fallen the economy has crashed and every remaining resources are controlled by the Order of Nations who will impose their will on the world with massive Land Battleships.

Atreides' homeworld Caladan is a questionable example of this. They throw babies into the ocean, and only those who can swim are considered worthy (those who don't obviously die). Also, the whole planet is governed by a monarchy, with all the issues that come from that. But, Atreides, considered as good guys, definitely have the best of the homeworlds to live in.

Geidi Prime of house Harkonnen is a crapsack world by all means. Volcanic Single-Biome Planet with polluting industry and few nobles with almost unlimited power, fighting between themselves for even more power. Klingon Promotion is very common.

Sigma Draconis of house Ordos is basically the same as Geidi Prime, but an ice planet. Instead of power-hungry nobles, Sigma Draconis is a corporate driven world. But the deception and Klingon Promotion is basically all the same as Geidi Prime. However, Ordos can see the value of someone, so, as long you are useful, you probably won't be killed just for fun. You will be killed by you competitors instead.

And, well, the actual Dune is pretty much this too:

It's a sand planet, where the water is very scarce. People have to wear suits which prevent losing body moisture and recycle their...waste.

As the spice, a highly addictive drug, comes from this planet, it's in the very air and soil. So if you live on Dune long enough, you've become addicted no matter if you want to or not.

Ah yes, the spice is produced by sand worms. Those gigantic sand worms the trope is named for.

Spice is exclusive to this planet. And it's the most valuable substance in the universe. That means the planet is plagued by constant warfare of houses fighting for Spice. In the last installment, the three houses agree on a legal all-out war for Arrakis to finally decide who will rule the planet, and thus the Spice and the universe. It ended up as the biggest war for the planet yet, and the traitorous house Tleilaxu unleashed the self-replicating zombies on population. You don't want to live on Arrakis.

Battlefield 2142 applies for this trope. Earth is in the midst of a new ice age and two superpowers are battling for what little unfrozen land they can get.

Xenogears. * deep breath* The nation of Solaris controls basically the entire world and rules with a decidedly malevolent fist. They conduct horrible, sadistic medical experiments on people. They kidnap surface dwellers to use as slave labor, and basically treat them as something like occasionally-useful parasites. They keep the world in a state of perpetual warfare. and, assuming you survive all of this, it turns out that all humans on earth, save one, were created for the sole purpose of one day being used as living material to recreate an ancient doomsday weapon which has been worshiped as God. By the end of the game, you're either dead, absorbed into the ancient doomsday weapon, a flesh-hungry zombie, or one of the roughly thousand people in the whole world still alive and intact.

Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden sends the good guys to a crapsack alternate future, where mankind was really screwed three times over. First, a gigantic gravity wave devastated the planet, then the Dinosaur Empire from Getter Robo beat up on the survivors, and THEN a full fledged war broke out between the Earth bound Innocent faction and the Space bound Moon Race that totally set back civilization for a good, long while. By the time your heroes get there, the ocean level is about 45% what it used to be, over half the world is a wasteland, the politicians on all sides are scheming, technology hoarding assholes with power complexes, and did we mention the Dinosaur Empire wants to turn the planet into the Mezosic Era, killing us all off, or that some creepy mechanically mutated humans called the Ancestors also want to kill us and literally redefine the world by their terms? It should also be noted that it's implied all the space colonies are destroyed, and whats left of the planet is valiantly struggling to heal from centuries of nukes, biomechanical destructive nanomachines, and more than a few Colony Drops. In an interesting aversion of SRW's idealism, even if you do give the alternate future Earth the ability to have a second chance and change history, that does NOT activate the Reset Button, and the Earth is still shown healing from all of the damage it has taken.

In general it's safe to assume the world in any Super Robot Wars game is going to be pretty crappy, with various anime bad guys invading the Earth, conducting their plans, joining forces or fighting against each other, with the original villains on the top of all of it. And it's up to heroes to fix things up.

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest shows what kind of world you saved in the previous game. The land is barren and lifeless, gravestones are everywhere, people are too poor to afford anything but unfurnished brick rooms, most will lie to you or tempt you with sin, expensive mansions once owned by the rich have signs of torture and enslavement, and creatures don't even bother to inhabit areas that people have long since abandoned and left to crumble. A lot of it is due to Dracula's Curse, but there's a reason why most of the games take place inside Castlevania — who's to say things are better on the outside?

Made a little better in later games, particularly Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, where the Hub Level is a small, well-kept village (well, well-kept once you save the villagers). Still, being attacked by Dracula and his monstrous hordes every few decades earns the world a few points in the "crapsack" column.

Whenever the world turns into one, it's usually a sign that Dracula's coming back (it's certainly no coincidence that he returned just in time for both World Wars.)

Legacy of Kain, a series of fantasy games where time traveling Vampire lord Kain clashes with his soul-eating undead son Raziel across the ages. The world of Nosgoth the series takes place in is host to massive web of ancient conspiracies, and over the course of the series experiences poverty, political warfare, extra-dimensional invaders, vampire empires, and due to the way the forces of nature are governed during it all the very ecosystem is slowly getting worse. It gets so bad that in Soul Reaver, which takes place the furthest down the timeline, the humans of the world are confined to one city up in the mountains, the vampires are scattered and going hungry, and the world has become a desert wasteland.

The game Nosgoth shows a world in between Raziel's execution and his resurrection. Humans and vampires are fighting a war in battlefields full of lush foliage, beautiful (and often destroyed or defaced) architecture, several trails and even fountains of blood, all just to enter the wasteland that we see in Soul Reaver where nobody wins in the end anyway.

Subverted, thankfully, in the end of the fourth game. Humanity wins, and begins to recover.

The The first three Oddworld games center on industrial excesses taken to such an absurd degree that no-one bats an eye at a meat packing plant planning to make their slave laborers into their next product line, while Stranger's Wrath takes place in more of a Crapsack World of a Western, where the townsfolk are so exaggeratedly helpless and cowardly they're literally chickens.

Combine-controlled Earth in Half-Life 2. The environment and infrastructure are in such an extreme state of disrepair after just a decade or two of Combine rule that it threatens the human race's very existence.

It's implied in the games (and outright stated by Word of God) that the Combine has zero interest in Earth's infrastructure; their interest begins and ends with raping the planet of any usable resources (and stealing our teleportation technology, which is by some aspects superior to theirs). Supposedly, Half-Life 2 was supposed to feature a plant designed to remove the oxygen from the planet's atmosphere, though it was scrapped early in development. Various types of aliens have also contaminated Earth's biosphere, such as the antlions (insectoid aliens which are extremely aggressive towards any other lifeform), headcrabs (which the Combine actually seems to breed for biological warfare), and ocean-faring leeches which make even wading out a short distance into the ocean a suicidal endeavor.

The Combine have also set up a Suppression Field to prevent humansfrom reproducing. They did this after wiping out a large portion of the human population, so twenty years later, humanity is on a downward spiral towards extinction. Although thankfully, with the destruction of the Citadel, the field is gone as well.

Pretty much all of Earth in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. There's the politically unstable hellholes of the Yellow Zones, which are ravaged by war, disease, famine, and Tiberium. Then there's the Red Zones, which are completely uninhabitable by human (or any carbon-based) life, and filled with the horribly lethal Tiberium. The only nice place to live is the Blue Zones, which are clean, healthy, pristine, and.... wait, what are those Scary Dogmatic Aliens doing here? ...oh, crap.

And this was an improvement from Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, where the atmosphere and oceans had been contaminated enough to leave the human race months from extinction, with the few safe population tucked away in the arctic.

Shadow Bane: The world has been shattered into numerous fragments, the All-Father is missing or dead, the Green Mother is crippled and in agony, Malor has joined the forces of Chaos, the most powerful sword in existence is in the hands of a vampire queen, and the Titan Torvald has been raised as a walking corpse by the Mother of Winter. Oh, and every time someone is reborn the world come a bit closer to destruction.

That's if you're a Sinner. The alternative is not much better, though: if you have technical knowledge (such as engineering or medicine), you can become a citizen. Although citizens get more freedom than Sinners, this comes at the cost of being treated like an object by the leaders (who refer to them as "human resources") and constantly being targeted by other Panopticons, who regularly send Abductors to attack rival Panopticons and kidnap their citizens. Even the game itself teaches you to objectify citizens, by literally making them part of your inventory (as "items" that can be used to improve your factories' production).

The world of Sanctuary from the Diablo series. The first game starts with the noble king of Khandruas going insane and being corrupted and his kingdom being destroyed. Then you have to kill the undead king, plus demons are killing people, the prince has been kidnapped and possessed. After 16 annoying levels you finally make it to the Big Bad, the title archdemon and beat him... except the prince is now dead and you just became Diablo's new, more powerful host. The second game lets you kill most of the Seven Great Evils... too bad it turns out they all end up getting revived, and the thing holding some semblance of stability over the world is destroyed. So horrible monsters are even more common. Did we mention there is no godSpoilers! There actually is, but he's been dead for ages and his corpse is the High Heavens and some of the angels (Imperius and Malthael being the most notable) are humongous jerkasses?

Humans get a vast power boost because of the destruction of the Worldstone. In the long run, there may be some hope. They're supposed to get stronger than demons or angels... but in the end it's still fifty-fifty because even according to the most benevolent angel (Tyrael), the heart of men is susceptible of temptations to evil, therefore there's an equal chance that they instead make it worse.

The world that the Resident Evil series takes place in: bioterrorism is common, an American city was nuked in order to end a zombie outbreak, and major corporations are involved in huge conspiracies which could cause the apocalypse. Really, when you get past the action movie cliches and the narm of some of the dialogue, the series is quite disturbing.

The world of the Grand Theft Auto series, especially Grand Theft Auto IV, which had fewer lighter elements than the others. Here we have a world so filled with corrupt politicians, crooked cops, backstabbing criminals and just plain crazy people that whatever amoral protagonist you're playing as almost looks like a saint by comparison.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a perfect example of this when you see Madd Dogg is threatening to kill himself via jumping off a roof. CJ tries to talk him out of it, but the locals tell CJ to hush because they already made a bet over whether or not Madd Dogg will jump. CJ can only say "Damn, this town is cold..."

Grand Theft Auto III has its version of a crapsack world in Liberty City. It was named "the worst city in America" in-universe for a very good reason. Criminals wander the streets at night, backstabbing and betrayal are very common themes in the game, a corrupt mayor, polluted waters, and a Corrupt Corporate Executive whose master plan is setting off a gang war between the Yakuza and the Columbian Cartel to cut down real estate prices for the city. The playable character is shot and left to die in the opening scene, to set the tone of this game.

While it's existence in the canon is only mentioned in the radios, Carcer City is also the location of a massive snuff film production company that seemingly encompasses the entire city and all the various gangs, corrupt cops and lowlives of the city.

Mega Man Zero elaborates on this, there being only one last bastion of civilisation in the planet, a racist dystopia that gets destroyed before the end of Zero 4. To drive the point home, the Colony Drop mentioned above is now possibly the last hope of restoring it. Which is exactly what it did, at the end of the series.

And then the Elf Wars occurs sometime after the Colony Drop. Two apocalyptic disasters, one after the other? It has to be a record or something...

Speaking of Mega Man...the band The Protomen have based 2 albums on a What If idea that turns the Mega Man Universe into one of the most crappy Crapsack Worlds there is.

The series as a whole is like this, to be honest. The series chronologizes about five hundred years of human suffering due to constant robot uprisings, almost all of which can be traced to two men- Wily and Weil. Fast forward to Mega Man Legends, and humanity has gone extinct, and most of the few remaining sapient robots are trying to kill the replacement species humanity left behind.

The only time life was not pain was the years between 20XX and 21XX, after Wily's death and before Cain tried copying X. Even the golden age between 22XX and 24XX was marred by occasional maverick uprisings and no less than three EvilPlans running just below the surface.

The world of Sands of Destruction doesn't look that bad at first — there's some intense Fantastic Racism, but nothing too alarming. Then you start seeing what the world is actually like as you play. Plagues of natural disasters and hostile creatures. Humans who are literal or virtual slaves to Ferals — beastmen who rule the world, and have so much political and physical power that they can literally get away with eating human children over trivial slights. The fact that the world appears to be headed for an inevitable decay into an uninhabitable desert. And that's just some of the first things you see or hear about. It's not too surprising that the heroes are the ones who said "screw it" and want to destroy the world because whatever comes next will have to be better — even if what's next is nothing at all.

Any setting in The Suffering. It's bad enough that Carnate Island had seen just about every sort of crime and punishment in history before its infestation by the Malefactors; it's even worse when the city the PC hopes to escape to is a fetid den of urban decay and misery that promptly suffers a Malefactor infestation of its own.

Holy crap, does the world in BlazBlue suck. After being ravaged by a being called the Black Beast, it then became governed by a totalitarian institution known as the Library. This totalitarianism resulted in the Ikaruga Civil War which, of course, left many, many people either dead or oppressed. Furthermore, the government imposes restrictions on anyone who uses a magic known as Armagus will be killed. To put things in perspective, when a man who kills every man and woman within a government institution is seen as the main Anti-Hero, you know things are screwed up. There's also a angelic woman who's kind to everyone and possibly the only good soul out there in that world and to be taken seriously. Guess what? She's siding that totalitarian institution now (albeit only to save someone and she's been broken quite a bit). Aside of that there's also a hammy hero of justice who really swore to uphold justice. There's only one problem though: He's your Joke Character. That's right, the world made it so that if you ever try to be overly positive and unbroken, you'll not be taken seriously. Of course, there's another catch: The totalitarianism is rumored to be controlled by a Troll. And God help you if you got a vagina in your body while living in this world. That monster troll will have his delight in breaking you physically and mentallyfor his own amusement. Have fun.

And here's more for the crapsackism. So if you remove that totalitarian institution, everything will be all fine and dandy, right? WRONG. You still have to deal with the fact that the world is ravaged, and the Black Beast left poisonous fumes in the world that linger in high concentrations even 100 years afer its death. Also, said totalitarian institute? It is actually a case of Well Intentioned Extremism, and if they disappeared, random people would be able to start picking up dangerous Artifacts Of Doom, enabling seeds of further war and chaos to spread in this world that is already teetering on the edge of destruction. So it's either totalitarianism, or a world in utter chaos. Yeah. Hang in there, bro.

Exacerbating the matters is the fact that the cast, aside from the Big Bad Duumvirate, is quite disorganized. Here's a rundown on why: note The aforementioned Anti-Hero shuns company, though winds up tolerating a clearly mentally underdevelopedcatgirl. The aforementioned angelic doctor is on the wrong side of the tracks, all for the sake of an amorphous aberration who she once knew, and said abberation, when human, was instead a glory-hound, self-serving, fame-seeking man with gigantic inferiority complex and constantly rejected her help and support (and he's not showing any signs of fixing that ego of his after what happened to him), and while she still cared on other people that do cared about her, a love from a hammy ninja of justice goes unrequited as said ninja of justice got designated into the role of Joke Character and Butt-Monkey (though with some... things, he's working on that), while attempting to defend his country rather than saving her (granted, he's not aware). There's a werewolf butler who serves a vampire, but he's only as modest in attitude as she allows, and she is too haughty for good's sake (she's working on that). The son of one of the major villains has a mechanical custodian who's actually his sister, who he was forced to service on his own due to daddy's abandonment of them, aaand he's got a knack on killing you with a polite smile on his face in case you're holding some information that he wants (he's working on that, thanks to said angelic doctor and hammy ninja of justice). The iron knight patrolling the land is quite aloof and easily driven to violence under the wrong circumstances, and his idea of 'justice' would be "This world is corrupt, I'm gonna cleanse EVERYTHING there, innocent or not!"... and does NOT trust humans at all. And then there's the Magical Girl who harbors three personalities, two of which are literally childish while the third is sealed away 99% of the time. Under the NOL banner, we have a determined, if psychotic, young man with severe brother-complex with the Anti-Hero (he's working on that), a warm young lady who goes cold when she's on the battlefield (don't ever ask why that is); and said psychotic young man just plain HATE HER for no reason; and another young lady dedicated to upholding justice (mostvigorously). There's a resistance movement, which are also no better than the totalitarian institute in general practice, its three members of note include a Mad Scientist whose nuclear arsenal vastly outweigh her temperament and is so hell bent in exacting vengeance on that Troll with her own hands; so much that nuclear arsenal is a viable option for her, and she would neglect on the pleas of help from that angelic doctor, who was once her student, thereby setting her off to the wrong road in the first place when she could've prevented that; a well-mannered and capable scientist/cyborg who is loyal to the aforementioned to a fault, programmed to do so and he's not fixing it for the moment, and a (normally) ditzy agent playing under the resistance banner while also paying lip service to NOL, but cares for the young lady with a Dark Secret to the point she's willing to betray just about anybody in the name of keeping her safe. And recently it's revealed that amongst its ranks is a dangerous Blood Knight who gives off particularly dense villainous vibes, who was reputedly kept in prison the whole time due to said villainous vibes, only to be released for whatever reason. And just also recently, there's another girl who belongs to another group that HATES said resistance movement, meaning that now it's leering closer to be as bad as the totalitarian institute. Aside of that, there's also an actually wise badass cat who may actually be the candidate for goodness and unity, only to mostly fail to unite and be cryptic, not to mention having a grudge to said Troll for killing his human wife... which may be that dark, mysterious magician under the Troll's employment, who doesn't speak. EVER. Not to mention that if you walk somewhere wrong, you may meet up some robotic girl with tons of swords ready to cut you down, and if that Anti-Hero was nearby... God help you if you get between them because she'll get so jealous even on sight alone, and kill you for getting in between them. Or alternatively, a rather convincingly fabulous Dude Looks Like a Lady who is so fixated on youth that he's chasing said 'son of major villains', giving off pedophilia vibes and if you ever so not meet his standards, he'll decrease your age. TL;DR, rather than realizing the threat and working for a better future, everyone else is minding their own business. Here's to unity, chap.

With all these you may think that perhaps there will be some good God to handle divine punishment if that monster gets too out of hand... wait, said 'God' is 'dead' by the monster. And there's this term 'World Antibody', which may be our last bet in place of the dysfunctional cast... except said 'Antibody' is that brother-complex-suffering psychopath, and even if he's working on it, who's designed as the world's enemy by that term? Not the villain, but the resident Anti-Hero, because he harbors a power of apocalyptic proportions that, if it conquers him, not even the Troll can suppress, much less control. Yes, just to rub the salt to the wounds, the world hates you and would prefer to keep the villain to exist rather than designating it as an enemy so he could be stopped. Simply put it as, the more cynical you are, the better chance of succeeding and being taken seriously. What a wonderful world,fellas.

That said, thanks to all the work of some of the protagonists, by the next game, things have gotten maybe a little better, starting to claw its way out of pure Crapsack territory, but it's still a mixed bag overall...note First of all, the Anti-Hero learned forgiveness from the Heroic Sacrifice of the formerly yandere robotic girl, and time with the ditzy catgirl may help ease his conscience further and said yandere robotic girl garnered enough willpower to re-materialize... unfortunately she picked the villain's quarter as a respawning point. Speaking of that, the vigorous justice-fighting lady has gotten even worse thanks to Mind Rape and goes into Knight Templar territory, but thankfully, the nice girl with Dark Secret has grown enough spine to make it her mission to save that justice fighting lady, a spine big enough to at least get said Dark Secret into a tame Super Mode for her to use for that mission, while her other squirrel friend has proven herself to be an actual nuisance for the enemy that could make things go haywire when unchecked (she's rubbing off her spirit and spine to the girl with Dark Secret), and from the inside, turns out the angelic doctor hasn't been reduced into an obsessed fanatical dark Love Martyr like everyone else expected, in fact she still retains most of her conscience, so with luck she could act like a mediator and a calming presence for the justice-fighting lady. Speaking of that, she is stabilizing her own condition and judging with her personality and her distrust to the bastard in the first place, only a matter of time until she stabs him in the back... She's also doing the same to the blob, but only as far as making him coherent, he still hadn't learned to be more humble or not getting himself into trouble for his own glory. And moving out from that, the badass cat is taking the psycho brother into his tutelage in fighting, hopefully getting him to be less dependant on the Anti-Hero... but he STILL hates that girl with Dark Secret. The young lad with the mechanical sister is managing his own problems thanks to said doctor and the hammy ninja... but he STILL remains angry at his dad instead of trying to take things calmly, thus bound for more upcoming mistakes thanks to rage. The hammy ninja, manages to realize just enough about his inheritance from his master to search for the truth in his homeland and uncover the rest... and if prediction comes true, then it is possible that the son of his master that he sought for turns out to be that fabulous pedophilia Dude Looks Like a Lady, though problem arises whether he'll take up his heritage and duties, or continue goofing off with his troupe and age obsession. Oh, and he has caught the attention of the the aforementioned vampire, who is working on her haughty disposition, meaning that he really could be pivotal. But on the other hand, the badass iron knight is still stuck in the same mindset, and the aforementioned La Résistance got worse as more of their dirty laundries get revealed, including murder of the squad of that vengeful girl, and the catgirl is still holding the nukes to ruin the world just so she gets to frag the villain. Moreover, the resistance released one crazy Blood Knight as its member that would find more home to be drinking buddies with that Troll... And the well-mannered cyborg is STILL not questioning his superiors for those crazy moves. It's a long way, but Keep up the good work.... and hope that Mr.

Amazing enough, things somehow get worse in the end. note Sure, things may be looking stride good, seeing that the totalitarian institute turns out to have one honest-to-God good colonel, even if he's pervy as hell, and is trying to reform the institute from the inside and even managed to gather many of the good guys, and even the Anti-Hero develops further, the vigorous justice-fighting lady is saved, the crazed Blood Knight is sealed away and the hammy ninja gets to actually DO something. Unfortunately, the angelic doctor pretty much lost hope and is forced to aid the Mad Scientist's genocidal plan to reshape the world so the amorphous blob will revert to a pre-corrupted state, and even said Mad Scientist's son decided to keep that father alive and sided with him for his own purposes, effectively crushing the ideals of the hammy ninja in spite of him being able to fulfill his duty. But even then, the ninja succeeded destroying the Mad Scientist's plan so bad that he's reduced into a depressive wreck now on the leash of his son and said doctor for their own purposes... which is still personal goals, not the betterment of the world. Even the totalitarian institute leader declared that her pervy colonel's plan can be fulfilled too. Also, the iron knight FINALLY got rid of the Troll for good (even if at cost of the life of one of his friends)! Hooray? Well this is where things go to hell: Totalitarian Institute Leader turns out to be the Death Goddess, wipes out the rest of humanity, and then brainwashes the Anti-Hero right into her services, and severely depowering the good guys' forces. Not to mention, already possessing the dark sorceress who is pretty much the Game-Breaker who made all of the Troll's antics possible in the first place, and even the iron knight fell down in one attack because of that. And apparently all hopes lies in... that vigorous justice-fighting lady who still hates the Anti-Hero regardless of his development, which would put her at odds with the other good guys. Uh huh... Crapsack World just got too literal, and once again... Here's for unity?

Implied through the emails in Assassin's Creed I. Africa's population has been decimated by a plague, massive number of illegal immigrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexican border...into Mexico, and hurricane season no longer exists, since hurricanes happen all throughout the year thanks to climate change.

Lampshaded by Dr. Warren in the first game. He said that there's no difference between the time of the Third Crusade and the time of the future, that people were just as violent and destructive than as now. And the second game reveals that the time of the Renaissance was even worse than both of them together.

The premise of the series as a whole. History is all a lie, the product of mind-controlling artifacts left behind by the First Civilization, who created humanity presumably as slaves, and the two competing factions trying to recover them. Today, the Templars control the most powerful corporation in the world and want to enslave the human race, while the Assassins are stuck waging a guerilla war from the shadows after the Great Purge. Oh, and there's a solar cataclysm on the way.

Deus Ex A devastating plague is storming throughout the world, a good deal of food seems to be limited to processed artificial food, and not to mention the all the secret cabals running about in the background. The world could also be considered A World Half Full however, depending on what ending you choose.

The sequel is once again a Crapsack World, and there aren't really any A World Half Full endings this time.

Theoretically, the Omar ending is better than the alternatives. You take out all the assholes pulling the strings, leaving the one group that gives a crap about the common man. Sure, the world will kinda suck for a while, but the entire point of the Omar is that humanity can survive this. And once everything is in place on the ground, the stars are waiting.

Technically, the AI ending is considered better by many players. You cause all of humanity to be included into a Borg-like collective intelligence overseen by a benevolent hybrid of an AI and the previous game's protagonist. Inclusion is mandatory, but global conspiracies and the need for world leaders of any sort become irrelevant in the new order. But the whole point of the game is how one person's choices can make a massive difference. Each of the endings may be considered a A World Half Full ending depending on the player.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually plays this down a little. There are still problems, but there are also extremely prosperous areas, and augmentation is widespread. Again, the game has Multiple Endings, where if you choose Sarif's, it causes things to potentially improve for humanity as well as arguably diverging the storyline from being a prequel to Deus Ex, while others will let them carry on as they were or get worse.

Papers, Please has the entire continent the game takes place in, with each country being crappy in its own respect. Arstotzka, your homeland and the main setting of the game, is a Soviet Union-esque totalitarian dictatorship ruled by oppressive xenophobes, but somehow is not quite as bad as most of the other countries, being home to some of the best doctors, the brightest scientists, and the most stable economy in the continent. Kolechia, Arstotzka's neighbors, is considered to be even worse, with a terrible health care system and being host to terrorists that regularly attack Arstotzka's borders, thus fueling Arstotzka's xenophobia. Antegria is under the thumb of an outright tyrant who spies on and kills their own citizens on a whim. Obristan is a hotbed of criminal activity, particularly drugs, and has even crappier border security than Arstotzka. The United Federation has a decent economy, but a lousy health care system that results in a resurgence of polio. Republia is an oppressive People's Republic of Tyranny, not unlike modern-day North Korea. The only country that doesn't seem to have any major issues is Impor. All of this on top of the fact that the game takes place during The '80s, which was the twilight years of the Soviet Union, a time when Communist states were on their last legs.

Stages 3-6 in Radiant Silvergun take place in an inhabitable post-apocalyptic world where there's absolutely no signs of life, only ruins which are partly transformed into a factory for Stone-Like to produce ships and weapons against the remaining battleship crew.

The Destroy All Humans! series makes the otherwise detestable and villainous lead character likable and somewhat sympathetic by planting him in a Crapsack World, in this case a warped and insane version of America during the Cold War.

Another parody example that actually has a story of why the world is that way is the PC game Pyst, which is supposedly what the world of Myst ended up looking like after millions of tourists wandered through it.

The Postal series. In Postal 2 at least, every townsperson is a jerk, the cops are mean, and the town of "Paradise" is portrayed as very corrupt and broken beneath the surface. All this is played up for humor, and also makes your Heroic Comedic Sociopath the most sympathetic character by comparison.

The world at the start of Breath of Fire is practically under the control of the Dark Dragons, with most of the towns being screwed over by them either For the Evulz (Gant, Prima), For Science! (Gust) or for particular Revenge (Tantar/Tuntar, Carmen). Those who can don't even try to stand up to them, as anyone who did ended up either dead (or close to, like Wyndia's king) or captured (Tantar's chief, Ox and Mogu's tribe).

The world of Breath of Fire II looks funny and slapstick, right? Except for the cheap circus with the freak show, the children crying from hunger in Whale Cove after you personally take away the family's source of income, the face-huggers, the witch's tower filled with beautiful men turned to stone, and the whole men being seduced to evil and turning into monsters, in service of a dark god you thought was really Saint Eva thing.

Breath of Fire IV opens in a world which has gone through 4 centuries of world war, with fears of a fifth breaking up soon. Most of the East Continent's towns are in varying levels of ruins and poverty, with the less fortunates being victim of the Fantastic Nuke owned by the Western Empire, which has left entire patches of them contaminated and unusable until they are cleansed, which in the best scenario can take up to several years.

In Breath of Fire V, the entire population of the world lives underground due to the surface having been rendered "uninhabitable". Not too bad, until the logistics of proper air control is brought into question. Their solution? Genetically engineer little girls to suck up the pollution (Who then die). Oh, and everyone has a D-Ratio, essentially an unchangeable classification of how valuable you are as a person. A 1/8192 is doomed to a life of menial labor. And the main character has a Dragon inside him, just waiting to bust out like something out of Alien. And this is not a story element, the player can cause this to happen in an irreversible way to force the game to be restarted. There's a reason the New Game+ option in this game doesn't require the player to beat it.

The world of Team Fortress 2, anybody? Sure, the characters all look like they're from a Pixar movie, but they are all pretty much amoral mercenaries who are killed in massive amounts every day. The only other option to this seems to be a life of submitting to bureaucracy. And it's all Played for Laughs.

That said, there are some nice people, even among the mercenaries. The Sniper comes to mind (ironically more so than the Medic), as does the Engineer. Also, we never really see anything outside of the battlefield, and the visible bits that don't have people warring over them look fairly normal. Although it's rather telling that even the nice characters in this setting are mass murderers.

Overlord. It's all played for laughs, but the world is so nasty, with everyone either corrupt, stupid, or useless, that your explicitly villainous Heroic Mime and his army of goblins are among the most likable characters. The character's brutal rule as tyrant or madman may actually be an improvement over what it's like already.

By the second game, the realm of the first games have been wiped out by a magical Cataclysm that apparently destroyed the haflings and dwarves, there's a massive anti-magic Empire wiping out as much as they can and the only real Hero Antagonists are the Elves that the previous Overlord apparently saved, but now they're all a bunch of whiny hippies concerned with the protection of fluffy creatures.

Azeroth, the eponymous World of Warcraft, is about as crappy a world as one is likely to find in the fantasy MMORPG genre.

Tirisfal Glades, the starting place of the Forsaken. It seems like a perpetual cloudy night, demons and Scourge roam the forests, and their very capital city is a bunch of tombs. The music is even the same for when you die and your spirit is trying to get back to your corpse. The Plaguelands are even worse. Icecrown turns it Up to 11.

The Worgen race is told to come from a vicious world, where no corner is truly safe. That humans could never survive there is a gross understatement.

Let's put it this way: the actual heads of each faction tend to be reasonable, but nearly every Number Two is The Starscream. Garrosh Hellscream will likely take control of the Horde, and wants nothing more than to charge at the enemy with the entire Horde in a fuel of rage, and literally wants to just charge and ignore anything that smacks of tactics. King Wrynn is equally as crazy and determined, and arguably in charge of enough of his faction to force a war no matter what. The few races that aren't burned from a history of dark magic and demons have done other spectacular things to either doom themselves. Only the tauren lack a significant fraction of their race that's trying to doom the world, and their leader is on his last legs.

Better yet, humans and most of the other races only exist on Azeroth because of the "Curse of Flesh" that the Old Gods put on the machines that the Titans created, so they could escape more easily. The lore behind the Bonus Boss Algalon the Observer is that he is there to check on Azeroth and seeing the results, will tell the Titans to wipe out the entire world and start over. The Old Gods don't have anything nice planned for this world either, and if they are all defeated, they'll likely destroy Azeroth as well.

Mists of Pandaria shows us why the Titans sealed up the Old Gods instead of killing them. When Y'shaarj was killed, its dying breath corrupted the land, and created a race of energy beings that feed off negative emotions, the Sha; so killing an Old God, just makes things worse. If all the Old Gods were killed, the resulting corruption would be so severe that the only option would be to vaporize the planet and rebuild Azeroth from scratch.

Everyone that goes insane on Azeroth goes insane BIG-TIME. Every other week someone gets it into their head to kill loads and loads of people, and they're only defeated by the skin of the adventurers' teeth.

The setting of the fourth expansion, the namesake Pandaria is either this or a crapsaccharine world. YMMV of course, but the villain races: the sha, the mogu and the mantid, and the ever present faction wars between the Alliance and the Horde make a strong case for it being a crapsack world.

Besides undead fallen lords and their hordes of minions, demons from another world, scheming villainous feudals, bloodthirsty wild animals and monsters, uncaring murderous giant Trows, and no less uncaring mages, the world of Myth is a perfectly fine place to live.

Despite the Scenery Porn, Riven under Gehn's rule is pretty darn miserable: the landscape is being ravaged for bookmaking materials, the A God Am I ruler feeds dissidents alive to a whale/shark/whatever, La Résistance are a bunch of religious wackos in spook masks, and the underlying fabric of reality is inexorably falling to pieces.

The world of Infamous starts out as a pretty crappy place to live in. After having a good chunk of itself destroyed in a catastrophic explosion, Empire City is hit with a contagious plague, forcing the US Government to completely quarantine the city. Gangs and superpowered thugs rule the city, while the police are either dead or in hiding. Other than the occasional PR-stunt supply drop, the government doesn't even do anything to help the populace of Empire City. Oh, and if you try to leave, the soldiers guarding the borders have orders to shoot to kill. The only thing keeping the government from just bombing the entire city into dust is because they want to recover the MacGuffin. It's up to the player to decide whether to try and clean up the city or make it even worse.

And just because they're Dueling Games, [PROTOTYPE] has a crapsack world where super-viruses can rewrite people into monsters, civilians are shot on sight for no good reason, and people keep dangerous biological weapons in major metropolitan areas. It gets progressively worse the further into the story you get.

And now, not only does Manhattan host Alex Mercer, it also has James Heller to contend with, who is willing to whatever it takes to destroy Alex. In other words, two psychopathic mutants sharing an unending hunger for flesh are now rampaging in a war-ravaged city. To further accentuate the degeneration of the situation in New York City, fresh and potent strains of the Blacklight virus are emerging, creating whole new abominations to wreak havoc on the hapless survivors. There is no way this will end well.

Dwarf Fortress. The motto of the game is "losing is fun". Unfortunately that means the average dwarf will die of any combination of being torn apart by monsters, starvation, terminal depression, being set on fire, or a variety of other methods. Furthermore, the magnitude of enemy attacks increases as your fortress wealth does. Small fortresses have to deal with the occasional kobold thief, whereas a gorgeous obsidian citadel will likely have to close itself off from the world due to hundred-goblin sieges. In other words, the better your fortress, the more crapsack the world. Of course, this is ignoring any potential player decisions to build a "flood the world with lava" mechanism in the spirit of Boatmurdered. Finally, there's the world's current state of Devil, but No God (unless you count the player as a god, which makes things no better); demons are clearly visible, actively claiming lordship over nations and generally turning the nations the rule into warmongering empires, while the gods respond to prayers with only silence.

Demon rulers don't rule any differently than any member of the civilization they're ruling. A demon leading goblins murders no more or less of it's citizens than a goblin ruler does, a demon in charge of humans may be a Pacifist or only kill in defense of their city. A demon in charge of an empire can make a World Half Full, at least bringing peace to large expanses of land and populations. Of course this is something you don't notice when they're busting down the doors of your fortress...

Phantom Dust takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where the last few remnants of mankind are forced to exist in pressure sealed underground sanctuaries to avoid the titular dust and the terrifying freaks it creates. If aforementioned monsters don't get to you there's a good chance your trigger happy and mentally unstable allies will. Not to mention that the dust will erase your memories if you stay out in it for too long. As for the only known bastion of civilization, its leader only communicates through a single spokesperson (who may or may not deliver the message accurately), supplies are gotten through raids on the surface since no one knows how to grow or make more, the non-dust using civilians are kept locked away in what appears to be a giant pit, and, perhaps most tragically of all, its hospital consists of two stone beds lying beneath buzzing, malfunctioning machines run by a nurse who seems to have gotten the job only because she looks cute in the uniform and seems to cure all ailments by stuffing patients full of whatever medication is found on the surface.

In Final Fantasy VII the Planet itself could have a very long list of reasons why it would qualify for this trope. But really it could be summed up simply by the fact that when people are exposed a large level of the life-giving force on the planet it either kills you or makes you mentally retarded. "Luckily" an international company that enforces its will and ways with a private army has industrialized sucking said life-force out of the planet, slowly turning the world into a barren wasteland in the process. On top of this, after Meteor is summoned to destroy the planet, what does the planet do in response? Release several ancient monsters upon the world in order to wipe out all of humanity since it deems that humans are too dangerous for the planet's survival, even though only one person summoned Meteor and several others want the planet to survive. The monsters that are summoned have enough power to destroy cities and level mountains. Then there's also Jenova, an Eldritch Abomination who can create illusions to mind rape all sentient life, mutate them into carriers of her cells, and ultimately suck the very lifeforce of the planet. AND there's her "son" who is a Humanoid Abomination instead and is basically doing the same thing except with even MORE Mind Rape. Fun times!

Final Fantasy XIII's Cocoon. Oh, God, Cocoon. It looks all sparkly and pretty, but look past that, and it would make 1984 look like a Sugarbowl. People living in fear? Check. Run by a currupt Beaurocrat? Check. Willing to murder an entire city to kill two l'Cie? Check. The entire population set up as a mass Human Sacrifice? Check.

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII's Nova Chrysalia. Chaos has swept over the entire world after the death of Etro in the midquel 500 years ago. The world has been slowly swallowed up by chaos in that time span, so only four locations are still safe. Nobody ages and no new life is born, but people are still capable of dying if they contract a disease that can't be cured, are fatally inured or get killed by human or monster hand. Said monsters are also frequently walking around the locations and they grow stronger the stronger the Chaos becomes. Oh, and the Chaos is going to swallow the remains of the world in 13 Days.

Orience, the setting of Final Fantasy Type-0, is in the midst of a Crapsack World War kicked off by the Militesi Empire invading the Dominion of Ruburm. War encompasses the entire region, people are dying on the streets (often violently), and people who die are wiped from the memories of those still living. Worse still, it has been like this since times immemorial, as the world is stuck in an endless loop.

Final Fantasy XIV may not have things seem so bleak at first until you start looking deeper. After the Calamity occurred, many locations and cities were destroyed and people are still rebuilding their homes and their lives. An ancient group of people known as the Ascians had taught the beastmen tribes how to summon deities called Primals; every time a primal is summoned, they absorb a large amount of aether, which is the planet's lifeblood. Some primals, like Garuda, exist to kill everything and gorge on as much aether as possible while other primals are more content with tempering people to their side so that the victims will mindlessly support and pray for that primal, giving them even more power. The worst part? Primals can never be truly killed, only temporarily stopped until the beastmen summon them again. When the primals aren't threatening the balance of the world, The Empire looms over the distance, trying to conquer the rest of Eoreza.

The city states themselves, on a smaller scale, aren't exactly pleasant places to live. Gridania, located in the middle of a forest, has its people extremely weary of outsiders. The people of Gridania are also compelled to please the elementals of the woods to keep the peace, even if it means doing very questionable things like letting a sick child sccumb to their illness. Ul'dah is supposed to be run by a democracy, but a handful of people within the group are content to keeping things as they are and not giving the other side any leeway; the merchants harass and bully people in the streets, criminal groups and corruption run rampant, and anyone who can't make a living deserves to fend for themselves because the city supposedly has no funds to spare to aid the needy. Limsa Lominsa is a city run by pirates, many who are very immoral for the sake of having freedom, that are at constant war with the Shagain beastmen tribe who are aggressively expanding into the Lominsa territory. When the Heavensward expansion came, the nation of Isghard finally opened their doors and their city is no better; there's class warfare between high born (the rich and elite members of society) and the low born (commoners and the poor), the city itself is very traditionalist to the point that during the Machinist and Leatherworker quests, it's noted that Ishgardians would rather stick to traditional means (using heavy armor for protection and using swords, shields, and lances for weapons against the dragon horde) and refuse to try something that would be more practical (using guns for long distance fighting and using leather based armor for more flexibility and warmth against the cold). The whole city doesn't take kindly to outsiders either and you'll be branded a heretic if you don't worship the bishop or if you even show any form of sympathy to the dragons. Heck, most of the 3.X series is about changing the nation from the inside out and while it is noted that such a change will take generations to accomplish, the city overall is at least much better now than it was back then.

The world of Final Fantasy XV is posited as seeing a fair bit of conflict over resources, and being a Final Fantasy setting, the rural areas still have problems with monsters, which runs the gamut from the humorous (such as people complaining about thieving goblins) to the deadly serious (Adamantoise causing earthquakes). Night time is when things get near unbearable, as daemons are spawning everywhere and can only be held off by strong enough light or camping runes. Nights are getting longer and longer as the Big Bad is achieving his goal and only a few towns can maintain the lights on 24/7.

Chrono Trigger - 12,000BC and 2300AD. In the former, the majority of humanity is left cowering in caves on a frozen planet (it being the Ice Age); the lucky few with magical powers live on a Floating Continent cluster... which is being held up by the stolen power of an Eldritch Abomination that slumbers within the planet. Their ruler has gone mad from this power, and the only decent person among them is doomed to a terrible fate. The latter is 301 years after the Eldritch Abomination emerged and laid waste to the world. What's left of the human race survives in a constant state of starvation, the machines that maintain their lives on the verge of breaking down, and many are left to think they're alone because the landscapes between their domes are inhabited by horrible mutants. And down south, a mad AI is turning humans into energy for her robot army. You cannot fix 12,000 BC, only survive its collapse; fortunately, preventing the horrors of 2300 AD is the goal of the game.

Although it is revealed in Chrono Cross that all the matter and people from terminated timelines, such as the post-apocalyptic 2300AD are dumped into the darkness beyond time, an endless, hopeless void from which there is no escape. It's a portion of this timeline that materialises on top of one version of Chronopolis, destroying it. So while you saved the future from unspeakable horror you at the same time condemned the survivors who already existed in that era to an EVEN WORSE fate.

The planet Pandora in Borderlands is a comedic example. Although it was originally colonized by the Atlas corporation in the hopes of turning it into a lucrative, prosperous mining settlement, it was found to be an almost completely barren and borderline uninhabitable wasteland. And that was before the spring cycle began seven Earth years later and the pathologically aggressive and incredibly dangerous local wildlife woke up from hibernation, and Atlas pulled out almost immediately, leaving their equipment and personnel behind. Then, of course, the huge number of prisoners and handful of colonists settled into a state of lawlessness, respectively becoming the several thousand murderous bandits and a few scattered pockets of civilization trying to scrape by. The entire planet is practically one big frontier with settlements scattered among the ruins of Atlas's old colonization efforts, plagued by a scarcity of food, water, electricity and medical supplies, and the near-complete lack of anything resembling functioning infrastructure or an effective government. Death is so common that you rarely see an NPC express grief, even when close friends or relatives are killed. Of course, it's set as a world rife with adventure for those brave and strong enough to survive in the wilds, and most of it's denizens are actually pretty entertaining, even if they're desperately trying to kill you. Oh, and one of the staples of the game is that there's lots, and lots of guns.

According to extra details and subtle implications throughout The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, the rest of the galaxy is no better off. The Mega Corps run everything and are heavily corrupt and incompetent, human life is worthless, and nepotism is rampant (to the point General Knoxx takes his orders from an Admiral who is a five year old).

Some aspects of The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned paint the background this way as well. For example, listen to the automated messages in Jakob's Cove, which include things like admonishing the now-gone survivors for using weapons designed by other corps because Jakobs doesn't produce the Fire ammo tech modded gear that is so helpful for fighting off the zombies.

Actually in the sequel, there's a lot more expression of grief. The bandit NPCs will acknowledge that someone near them died, and the Hyperion guards will actually admonish you with phrases like "He was two days from retirement!"

Dragon Age: Origins takes place in one. The opening cutscene introduces you to a world where Heaven has been destroyed, the world is threatened by a near-unstoppable army of monsters, and the only people who could possibly stop them are nearly extinct and are forgotten and ignored by the world at large, to the point that it might be too late to save the world. It gets worse. Let's see... there's the Knight Templars who go around killing anyone who shows magical ability and didn't submit to be stolen from their family and allow themselves to be turned into a soulless husk or subjected to an oppressive training regimen that possibly ends with their death — and might actually be justified in doing so (mages are the ones who blew up heaven and created the Blight, and their very existence attracts Demons to the world); the fact that elves only exist as virtual or literal slaves to humanity or exiled tribes in the wilderness; the dwarves have been waging a losing war against aforementioned army of monsters for generations and only have two remaining cities; the fact that government and nobility seem to be corrupt and laden with treachery almost by nature... well, from here, let's just mention that the developers specifically mentioned A Song of Ice and Fire as inspiration and leave it be, shall we?

Better yet, Treasure Town is a fine place to live in, if you don't mind a crime rating BIGGER THAN Detroit, a Cloud Cuckoo Lander guild master, time traveling saints from Hell, your daily dose of horror, and an exploration team that actually steals from children. What's fine about Treasure Town again?

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity it's such a crapsack world that... One of the main villains wants to destroy it and kill everyone in it, since no-one can hate or suffer if they're dead the Villain even outright admits it's a crapsack world, though doesn't use that word.

For those of you who want humans in your Pokéverse experience, we have Orre or, as a better word, Hell). The government barely has anyone of note. The police are utterly pathetic and cannot keep two goof-offs behind bars for very long. The deserts which make up the Eclo Wastes are almost utterly barren of life. The police turf in Pyrite Town has more hoodlums per square foot than any other region to date. Occasionally, these hoodlums form gangs which make life for the locals pretty bad. And then, there's Cipher, the patron saints of Paranoia Fuel in the Pokéverse. The group believes only in power, and will engage in methods to obtain it that can only be described as inhuman - trainer assault, Pokéverse theft, federal subversion, Mind Rape, homicide... these guys were the undisputed bottom of the morality barrel in the Pokéverse before Ghetsis showed up, and the two are fighting over that title to this day. The Ranger Corps talks about lots of other regions (except maybe Unova due to limited intel) - even they will not bring Orre up. It's THAT bad.

To make this even worse, whatever disaster turned Orre into a wasteland rendered Pokémon almost extinct in the wild, making them rare. Villainous organizations not only steal them the way typical villains in the franchise do, but use a horrid technique that turns them into Shadow Pokémon, corrupted, evil creatures that are prone to mad rages in the midst of a battle. (In both games, a big part of the heroes' mission is to rescue ["snag"] and then cure ["purify"] these corrupted Pokémon.)

To elaborate, the Modern Warfare universe at first seems to be a slightly different version of our world today. For all of the first two missions. When, via Controllable Helplessness, you are shot in the face point-blank range by a power hungry warlord, you realize that this world ain't particularly friendly. When you lose your entire troop regiment to a goddamn nuclear bomb, and die slowly due to radiation, the crapsackiness of this world sets in. Believe it or not, it gets worse as the game goes on. You learn that Russia is being torn apart by a civil war between hard liners called the Ultranationalists and a Russian army that can do all but very little to hold them back. Next, during a flashback, it's revealed that low-level terrorist groups have more than ready access to nuclear weaponry. However, this all gets eclipsed by the American campaign in the second game. Those hard liners? They took power. And, wouldn't you know, they've just been itching for a reason to attack America. Needless to say, it's given to them. By you, no less. You spend the rest of the American campaign defending a war-torn Washington, D.C. from the Ultranationalists. To finally let you know how much the world in Modern Warfare sucks, when you kill General Shepherd, the guy who instigated all of the crapsackiness of the second game, it does absolutely nothing to stop his plans. In fact, he's already succeeded. All you did is prevent him from seeing it. Considering the Modern Warfare series placement on the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism, it'll probably get even worse by the timeifModern Warfare 3 roles around.

Oh it does get worse in Modern Warfare 3. VERY MUCH SO. Just from looking at a few teaser trailers, the world is fully engulfed in a Third WORLD WAR. And considering this series track record with nukes,expect them to be dropped like rainfall.

Ironically, no nukes in Modern Warfare 3. You do get to see New York City get torn apart. Later on European cities start resembling themselves in 1944-45. Use of poison gas in several of those same European cities just makes things worse.

EVE Online is a crapsack world for anyone who isn't a capsuleer or safely tucked away in a station, as most of the game consists of going out and blowing up everyone else.

And even if you ARE a capsuleer, nullsec is a never ending hell of being podkilled unless you're in a powerful corp.

Even if you are in a powerful nullsec alliance, some crafty person can steal everything from you and hundreds of alliancemates, and this is the intention of the game. Lowsec is plagued with the more ethical pirates who simply want to ransom you, to the less ethical ones who will take your ransom and kill you anyway, then post your pleas for mercy to the official forums. Highsec, theoretically the carebear section of the game, has dozens of people waiting for you to take out that 5-billion isk faction battleship and blow it up simply for the bragging rights. The backstory for the game is worse.

And now it's being invaded by cybernetic zombies, intent on turning everyone in the galaxy into a Wetware CPU.

Nullsec, even for veterans, is a cycle of never-ending conflicts and skirmishes. You fight to defend what you have from others who want to take it, and you fight to take from others what the alliance leadership wants. It's a constant fight, fought with ships, spies, and public relations.

The world in Fallout is a crappy post-apocalyptic wasteland, where 200 years after nuclear holocaust the civilization is still fighting for survival. Attractions include, but are not limited to: Chaos and anarchy, bandits, mutated animals (and not only animals), killer robots, radiation, crazy religious cults, outdated technology that will most likely fail you and plenty of deadly diseases. Also, the only food that you will find are either 200 year old frozen dishes or meat of unknown origin. Either way, the best option is cannibalism.

...Or, you know, just eat Brahmin (cows with two heads) meat, or plants. There's a number of places people can get them plants, though they aren't omnipresent.

The Pre-war world was actuallly not much of an improvement due to lack of resources. The events leading up to the nuclear holocaust involved a Euro-Middle Eastern War over oil, only ending when the wells in the Middle East dry up, leaving no point in fighting, Alaska is invaded by China for its oil, the U.S. basically forces Canada into being annexed, with protesters being shot on sight, the country is ravaged by a plague, particularly in Colorado, nuclear power and weaponry are both looking better with each passing moment, propaganada can be found even in schools, robots are replacing human workers, increasing unemployment, riots and death are increasingly common, and, with the fear of nuclear winter on everyone's mind, the U.S. government has had over a hundred high tech nuclear shelters known as "Vaults" to protect the people who can afford them. And even then, the vaults were just an experiment for the government to see how humanity would deal with varying circumstances. A handful of "control" Vaults were built and ran exactly as th public thought they would, but the rest of the vaults had special conditions. One was overcrowded, one had a door that wouldn't fully close, leading to radiation flooding it, one was an experiment to use sound waves to mind control people, which failed, and the subjects went violently mad, killing off everyone in the vault, one had hallucinogens pumped through the vents, one was set never to open, and one had the residents trapped in a virtual world completely controlled by a scientist who would torture them for his own amusement. A nuclear war may have just been the Reset Button the world needed. In New Vegas' Old World Blues DLC, your brain even agrees with this interpretation, specifically calling the wastes "a landscape so bleak, it was actually improved by the end of the world". Considering the fact it has access to an extensive library during that conversation, it may have a point with that.

As stated earlier, the Fallout games are much closer to A World Half Full. Yes, the world does suck, with innumerable things that will either kill you or make you wish you were dead, but the stories of the games always end happily. (Canonically, at least they do...) Fallout 3 was probably the closest that the series came to this, and even then the main storyline ends with the Capital Wasteland on the path to recovery. The world sucks, but the player can do everything they can to fix it up, and yes, make a long term difference in the Wastelands. Plus, the Oasis in Fallout 3 shows that someday, the world CAN get better. Ironically, this has really pissed off the guy who created the series, who insists that his plan was for things to continue to get worse.

This comes full circle by Fallout 4, as now the player has the option to found and improve settlements, actually working towards rebuilding society.

Tales of Symphonia is a crapsack world for sure. You start in a world dying from a severe lack of Mana,(Sylvarant) which causes the world to become barren, the only person who can Save the World is a 15ish year old girl who just happens to be a major Klutz and a Dumb Blonde. Not to mention the world is being oppressed by a group of half elves called the Desians whose sole purpose is to enslave humans and stop the world from being saved. This causes the humans to develop a hatred of ALL half elves. This is all made worse when you realize EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A LIE. And even after this revelation, and you travel to the second world(Tethe'alla), things aren't much better there. The world is pretty much ruled by a corrupt church, who's pope is poisoning the king, and actively promotes racism against half elves. It turns out the worlds are in a tug-of-war over a dwindling mana supply, so when one world prospers, the other begins to die, and the tug-of-war is being controlled by a group of "angels" called Cruxis. Oh, and remember the Desians? Yeah they're PART of Cruxis. They appear in which ever world is being depleted of mana to force the tug-of-war to continue. And even when you start to manage to fix things, you just end up messing them up again. In fact, the whole plot of the second game is that because you "fixed" everything, you screwed up BOTH worlds. How's that for a crapsack world? Admittedly it can also fall under Crapsaccharine World and A World Half Full.

Let's face it: the Red Faction universe sucks. Civilization on Earth is collapsing because all of its metal ores are used up and running dry, so Mars is colonized and mining operations begin there. Unfortunately, the Ultor Corporation's last concern is the safety and treatment of the miners, with the people constantly abused, shoved into atrocious working and living conditions, and infected with a mysterious plague caused by Ultor's experiments in nanotechnology. The titular Red Faction, with assistance from the Earth Defense Force, manage to destroy Ultor, and the EDF gains control of Mars, and terraforms the surface so humans can live unaided on the surface. Unfortunately, the EDF begins running the mining operations exactly like Ultor, and the Marauders, descendants of Ultor, regularly raid colonist settlements. The new Red Faction, after several hundred casualties and deaths, manages to fend off the EDF and the Marauders, and take back Mars again. In Armageddon it is revealed that the EDF's terraforming technology has malfunctioned horribly, causing severe storms to ravage the surface and make it uninhabitable, forcing humanity to flee underground. All seems okay now... at least until an alien species sealed in old Marauder temples is released, terrorizing humanity again. The colonists just can't catch a break, can they?

Don't forget that Red Faction shares a universe with the Saints Row series, set in the present day where you play as a gang member who takes over the criminal empire of the city of Stilwater twice. In the first game you were just a member of a gang trying to restore order to the city, yeah, but in the second game you lead the gang in your war to turn the city into your own personal playground. Oh, and the second game also deals with Ultor heavily, and at times even foreshadows the role they'll play in the Red Faction games, most notably in the DLC "Ultor Exposed".

Wild AR Ms: Filgaea is a very, very, very unfortunate planet. Some ancilliary media indicate that all the games- at least five at last count- take place on the same world, separated by millenia. If this is true, it has had at least three invasions by time-traveling robots, invading alternate universes, invading aliens, etc... and throughout it, most of the time, the entire planet is a resource-poor desert wasteland. Generally, every time they start repairing the environment enough for life to not suck royally all around, they get another bunch of would-be conquerors up in their grills, and, in the process of fighting them off and/or sealing them, ruin it again.

It is near impossible for the Filgaias of the various games to be the same planet. For example, humans are natives in 1 and foreigners in 3, Elw were technological gods in 1, turning to nature later whereas in 3 they were always hippies. And extinct. This isn't even going into the various incarnations of Zeikfried and such. It's sufficient to say that each Filgaia is a crapsack in its own right.

Sera in Gears of War has been rendered a truly awful place by decades of nonstop war. The Locust Horde has been waging a campaign of genocide against the human race since their sudden assault on Emergence Day. The human government (COG) had to resort to using the Hammer of Dawn WMD system simply to stall the Locust and prevent them from using COG's own resources against them, which had the side effect of killing millions more humans and rendering most of Sera a desolate wasteland. By the start of the series, only a minority of the human race survives in the handful of remaining cities or living as Stranded, many of whom are hostile to the COG. Finally, the COG itself has a fascist/communist feel to it.

Made worse in Gears of War 3, where Sera is so screwed and uninhabitable that the remaining humans have to go live on giant boats, with no government over humans and with not only one, but TWO races trying to kill everything.

Even the hailstorms on Sera are doing their best to kill you by dumping razor sharp shards of ice on your head. Any creature that steps out of cover during a razorhail storm is reduced to ground meat in seconds.

Just like the real-world, Tamriel has had it's ups and downs throughout history. To note some of the more notable "downs":

The 2nd Era Interregnum following the fall of the AkaviriPotentates and the rise of TiberSeptim is basically Tamriel's equivalent of the Dark Ages. Numerous factions vied for control of the vacant Ruby Throne of Cyrodiil while attempted Daedric takeovers and yet another Akaviri invasion ravaged the continent. The Elder Scrolls Online, a prequel to the main series, takes place during this time.

The Imperial Simulacrum, tied to the events of Arena, is another. Emperor Uriel Septim VII is imprisoned in Oblivion by his Imperial Battlemage/Evil Chancellor Jagar Tharn, who serves as the game's Big Bad. During Tharn's 10 year reign (using magic to impersonate Septim), the Empire is irrevocably fractured. Unrest in the provinces is high and, after being rescued, only the machinations of Septim are able to hold it together.

Following the Oblivion Crisis, the Empire is left without a Septim heir for the first time in nearly 500 years. High Chancellor Ocato is named Potentate and managed to hold the Empire together for 10 years, but he is assassinated by the Thalmor in a (successful) attempt to destabilize the Empire. The Thalmor seize control of the Altmeri government and secede, annexing neighboring Valenwood to reform the Aldmeri Dominion of old. The "Red Year" rocks Morrowind, a part of a long Trauma Conga Line for the Dunmer, rendering much of it uninhabitable and later, the southern parts are captured by the invading Argonians, seeking revenge for thousands of years of enslavement at the hands of the Dunmer. Elsweyr secedes and joins the Dominion as a vassal nation. Petty kings fight over the vacant Imperial throne, with the Colovian warlord Titus Mede finally claiming it. The Dominion begins the Great War with the vestigial Septim Empire now led by Mede's grandson, Titus II. Though The Empire is able to push the Dominion out of Cyrodiil, it is too exhausted to fight further, allowing the Dominion to force the imposing White-Gold Concordat onto the Empire which, among other things, bans the worship of Talos.

By the time of Skyrim, the ban on Talos worship leads to Civil War among the Nords of Skyrim, one of the only remaining provinces in the Empire. Then Alduin and the dragons return, plunging the land further into chaos and darkness...

In a more "meta" sense, throughout the series, you can't travel more than a hundred feet without being accosted by the local wildlife, bandits, or something even worse. Even sticking to the roads won't necessarily help. And don't bother trying to take refuge in a cave or ruin. With only a very few exceptions throughout the series, they will almost certainly contain something or someone else who try to kill you as soon as you step foot inside.

No More Heroes: Santa Destroy, as shown through Travis' map of the place. The beach is full of toxic chemicals, there is an old weapons testing ground filled with killer scorpions, the people are actually ashamed to live in the town and all to happy to leave, the job employers send you tips for work at the assassination centre disguised as an advertising agency, and the fast food places are garbage. That's not even getting into the Ranked Assassins....

And in the sequel, it turns out that the main character inadvertently popularized the assassination business and turned the town into a booming Wretched Hive.

Geneforge. Ah, Geneforge. Very much a grey and gray world, but that doesn't stop everyone from trying to kill one another. The Awakened are easily the nicest faction in the first two games: they can be ruthless killers when they need to be, but are at least fighting for a world in which creations and humans can get along as equals. Guess what happens to them? By the third game, the two main sides are the Shapers and rebels. The former have an extreme case of Fantastic Racism regarding their creations, keeping all Serviles permanently enslaved and attempting to exterminate several entire sentient species. The latter are full of violent maniacs drunk on power who tend toward a lot of A God Am I, and dabble in racism as well. The nicest characters with any real pull on either side tend to be anti heroes and well intentioned extremists.

Monday Night Combat takes place in one of these, though you couldn't tell by looking at it. Underneath the cartoony art style hide Presidents for Life, food dispensed from tubes, a life expectancy of 28, and churros.

The World Ends with You has this for the afterlife. You can have a normal life and then die, and what's waiting for you after death? A seven-day game run by the Composer. You do tasks, but you're hunted down by Noise, things that can erase your existence, Reapers, that can erase your existence... and if you make it to the end, you can either choose erasure or reaper— not many people win the ultimate prize being reborn The game is also fixed. Good luck!

Psychic Force has a world constantly ravaged in a war between Psychiccer and humans, creating an endless strife. However, what makes it crapsack is that the world will go out of its way to NOT give anyone with sympathetic qualities a happy ending. Happy endings goes to villains, anyone else receive Downer or Bittersweet Ending

Dragon Quest VI When you first arrive at the Dread Realm/Dark World not only is everyone in this world weakened to the state where the human inhabitants can barely lift a glass of wine, they are also forbidden by the big bad from having any hopeful or pleasurable thoughts at all. This got to the point where many of the villagers would contemplate suicide just to escape this hell. Later in the same realm we see a group of villagers willing to kill elderly men and women for the treasure of a sage, which turned out to be an empty chest anyway, this was all a plot by the archfiend to spread a rumor of said treasure to lure everyone into looking for it, then watch as they all kill each other over an empty box. Then there is the prison where humans who had so much as hope were sent, seemingly just for the pleasure of torturing them, who are given very small rations of sustenance, beaten on a regular basis, and have daily hangings in front of the other prisoners.

NieR has magic infecting an unsuspecting world via the inverted Golden Ending of Drakengard. As a result, seasons and even the daylight cycle have been utterly broken. Wildlife is disappearing, and contact between the few remaining human settlements is being eroded by the ever-increasing hordes of monsters known as Shades literally lurking in every shadow. The few humans that survived are slowly succumbing to a disease known as the Black Scrawl. Humanity as a whole is slowly facing extinction. The title's Chronic Hero is doing whatever he can to brighten people's days, but even he can only offer bittersweet closure, not any actual good news.

Hell, the original Drakengard universe counts itself. When a party made up of a murder-happy psychopathic mute, a cannibalistic elf woman, a pedophile, and a religiously racist old man Mission Control are meant to be the good guys, you know you're in a Crapsack World.

Left 4 Dead seems to make the world absolutely ruthless for anyone who is a survivor in the zombie apocalypse. Most of humanity is either dead, a cannon fodder zombie, or a special zombie with hideous deformities. Any survivors you do happen to meet will be paranoid of your immunities and will call a horde of zombies on you just to prove whether or not you are immune.

Left 4 Dead 2 makes it a whole lot worse where every rescue attempt ends in failure, forcing you to trek your way to your next rescue attempt and the military in the final campaign is bombing New Orleans to wipe out the zombies and they ask the survivors if they are carriers. It's shown on the graffiti on the walls that some people think carriers are dangerous to non-infected people and the military decided to kill anyone they thought were carriers. Nick comments about this a few times and is greatly worried about their own fate.

The Sacrifice comic reveals that carriers are people who are immune to changing into a zombie, but can still spread the virus to others unwittingly, which is what the survivors in both games have been doing! On top of this, when the military "saved" the survivors in Left 4 Dead, they only saved them to see if they can develop a cure for the virus and planned to kill them if they couldn't get a cure. The survivors barely manage to escape (with the help of a few soldiers who were wise enough to listen to them) and get on a train heading south as Bill explains his plan to get them to the Florida Keys, where they can live in peace without zombies (they can't swim) or the military trying to kill them. So in a nutshell, if you aren't a carrier, you will become an infected and if you are a carrier, the military will try to kill you. The world be fucked.

Homefront. The central story of the game takes place in 2027, after the American economy has fully collapsed, the Middle East is on fire, which causes gas prices to nearly hit twenty dollars a gallon and North and South Korea have joined forces and annexed Japan and a host of other nations. Also, a massive thermonuclear weapon has been detonated, shutting down America's electronic infrastructure and the Korean People's Army has seized the entire US west of the Mississippi River. Which is irrevocably toxic thanks to said thermonuclear weapon. And a variant of the bird flu is killing off citizens left and right.

Its Continuity RebootHomefront: The Revolution isn't any better. The 2003 invasion of Iraq exacerbated with almost the entire Middle East against the United States. Riyadh was nuked by a smuggled Iranian nuclear bomb, which lead to absolute unrest in the U.S. combined with the subprime mortgage crisis, and forcing the nation to enacting a state of emergency and suspending the 2016 Presidential Elections. North Korea is under the rule of a Mega Corp. that produces the world's highest demanding technology, which are chipped and secretly monitored from North Korea, and successfully conquered America by simply turning off the U.S. military's APEX hardware. The United Nations remains helpless as the world is controlled by APEX technology, Russian-owned oil, and Chinese manufacturing.

Earth's pollution in Run Saber has reached the breaking point, turning it into unhabitable for humans. And then appears a Mad Scientist with promises of cleansing it, only to end up exiling humanity into space colonies and filling it up with mutants and parasites under his total control. Most of the locales are abandoned ruins run over by monsters, and while the ending does end on a high note, it's still pretty much a barren Earth humanity is returning to. And that's assuming the good doctor did take care of pollution before enacting his master plan...

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has the Republic basically shattered, with the protagonist being one of the last surviving Jedi in the galaxy, even though canonically the first game has the player saving the entire galaxy. Pretty much every planet visited by the PC is either a desolate wasteland or it has a corrupted government, where there's basically no authority to keep things in order. The only exception of this might be Telos, but then again the Exile blows up its only fuel source. Guess what happens when a giant space station that acts as a city doesn't get its fuel. You can fix it later on though. If that wasn't enough, everywhere the player goes there's someone trying to kill them. There's actually very few places that get to be saved from impending doom.

Star Wars: The Old Republic has it that the galaxy is in complete chaos. Then again, judging from the trailers, it doesn't look that bad.

In Ultima V Britannia becomes this, which is saying a lot since this is the land that went through being terrorized by not one, but two evil sorcerers and their demon/computer/whatever creation. True, the monsters that once roamed the countryside are now mostly gone, appearing mostly at night or in the wilderness, but the new regime of Lord Blackthorn has taken a bit of a hardline on Britannia's philosophy of the Eight Laws of Virtue, making charity mandatory, punishing most infractions of justice with death, and even forcing dishonored people to commit suicide! Then there are the Shadowlords the entities who corrupted Blackthorn to begin with whose presence is enough to turn an entire city violent and sadistic.

Earth becomes this in Darksiders after suffering through a premature Apocalypse in the beginning of the game. Humanity itself has died off. The world is littered with the ruins of civilization. Sandworms patrol entire deserts created from human ashes. All while the forces of Heaven and Hell wage their meaningless war for supremacy.

While not quite as oppressively miserable as Termina, Hyrule isn't exactly a picnic, either, considering the land is fairly dangerous even during peace times. Factor in the civil wars, racial tensions, power struggles over the Triforce, and a Big Bad who wreaks utter devastation every few centuries, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that many of the games end on a bittersweet note. Skyward Sword justifies the crapsack: the God of Evil Demise cursed Link and Zelda (the mortal incarnation of Hyrule's goddess Hylia) to face an incarnation of his hatred every time they reincarnate.

Even after the cycle is broken in The Wind Waker by leaving Hyrule and Ganondorf trapped at the bottom of the ocean to slowly crumble away, the new lands that people settle have their own various monsters and demons causing trouble for everyone else.

Lorule of A Link Between Worlds. It's dark, gloomy, the land is literally falling apart, and everyone is grouchy and miserable. Like Termina, it is also doomed to destruction, thanks to the elimination of its Triforce. Fortunately, this is fixed in the ending.

A Link Between Worlds adds a new element of crapsack to Hyrule: The Triforce is a Cosmic Keystone, so it cannot be removed from play without causing The End of the World as We Know It. This, combined with Demise's curse, means Hyrule is destined to suffer eternal war over the Triforce.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild features the most vibrant incarnation of Hyrule yet. However, that's only because the Calamity Ganon, the latest form of the Demon King, destroyed the kingdom a century earlier. The people of Hyrule now live in isolated towns and villages, all while Ganon's power grows in the ruins of Hyrule Castle.

Unless the trailers are lying, the world of Final Fantasy Type-0 is not going to be a particularly nice place to live, as it depicts a world caught up in a full-on, no-holds-barred global conflict against the Empire of Milites, with plenty of death and suffering all over the place. In fact, it can all be summed up in this quote:

It was their destiny, and theirs alone to decide. Free from fear of fate, gazing undaunted into the eye of death.

Ah, Demon's Souls. The world is being swallowed by a colorless fog that unleashes demons because someone had the bright idea to awaken the Old One from his sleep. Boletaria, the kingdom where the game takes place, has been almost completely destroyed, and very few people who are still sane and still have their souls remain. The rest have been eaten by demons. Even BEFORE the events of the game, it's a crapsack world; The Land of Defilement is filled with trash and filth, and the lost and unfortunate make their home there. When the demons arrive there, it's actually an improvement. The island of the Shadowmen was formerly full of people who cared more about the dead and storms than the living. The God of Demon's Souls turns out to be none other than the Old One himself. Even at the end of the game, you can't catch a break; your choices are to either: A, Allow the Old One to go back to sleep and become a Monumental, half-living yet aware statues who are supposed to be immortal, but die anyway, and be charged to watch over this crappy world for the rest of your unnatural life,, or B, Kill the Maiden in Black, join with the Old One, and destroy the world as you know it.

Tales of the Abyss wouldn't have much of a story without reaffirming this with every single plot development. Out of the six playable characters, Ion and Mieu: two don't know who their real parents are, two aren't who they claim to be, two are double agents, two are exiles, two have to kill family members, the very existence of two of the main characters has ruined the lives of two of the villains, two are replicas, two are relatives of the villains (four if you count the replicas), one desires to kill Luke, one is indirectly responsible for killing Ion, one is indirectly responsible for a mass genocide and one is responsible for the creation of the most despicable science in Auldrant, and MORE. And these are just the HEROES.

One is the once-beautiful Wonderland, slowly being corrupted by Alice's own psyche, and filling with Creppy dolls and ruin, even without getting into level-specific features such as the dodo "misery-ium" in Hatter's Domain, the Ink Wasps' brutal oppression of the ants in the Oriental Grove level, and the Dollmaker's Workshop.

The other, Alice's "real world" is a grimdarkDickensian London where practically everyone has an agenda and/or one of the worst lives in existence, even without Angus Bumby running around pimping orphans.

It is quite possible to create one in Tropico by tearing down all buildings one could live in (besides your palace), let crime go mad, barely have enough food for your people, and pay them all a dollar for anything that isn't being in your military, and let the enviroment go to Hell. Of course, be prepared for rebellions and your international relations to go VERY sour.

The island always starts out as a Hell hole. Tropico 3 states that "Tropico has just been declared a fourth world country."

Earth 2150. The never-ending war between the Eurasian Dynasty and the United Civilized States comes to a head when the UCS' military AI shoots a nuke into the North Pole, screwing up Earth's orbit and hurtling it into the sun. The conflict escalates because both sides are trying to harvest what's left of the planet's resources. Not even the independent lunar colony is safe so they are pulled into the conflict. The sequels showed they all escaped Earth's destruction but their conflict continues.

Not only that but the three factions secretly agreed that those who left behind (of Lost Souls fame) so the [[Status Quo Status Quo]] would not be disrupted.

Total Annihilation could probably have one of the most grim and darkest settings ever conceived, if it wasn't glossed over a bit too much. Four thousand years of hyper-industrialized warfare between the Core and the Arm has completely decimated the entire galaxy and rendered it devoid of all life other than the shattered remnants of the two factions, which continue battling for supremacy across ruined worlds. Humanity is long gone and has been completely replaced by "Patterned" machines, which ultimately was the original cause of the conflict.

The Starcraft universe. Earth's government oppresses its inhabitants and exiles its criminals and political dissenters to the Koprulu sector. Said convicts found the Confederacy which proceeds to oppress its inhabitants. The Sons of Korhal overthrow the Confederacy and found the Terran Dominion in its place, which also oppresses its inhabitants. Then Earth's government comes to bring order to the lawless and war-torn sector (read: oppress its inhabitants). All while embroiled in a seemingly Hopeless War between the Protoss and the Zerg.

The world of Dark Souls isn't a happy place at all. The flames that gave rise to life are going out leading to most places in the world to have endless nights. Mysterious brands called the "Dark Signs" are cursing humans with undeath (including the player character) whom are doomed to lose their humanity and become insane Hollowed monsters. The gods of the world are also suffering, except two Gwynevere and Gwyndolin, and they either abandoned their people to their fate or care more about their own power and influence than about fixing the world. One god is a shadow of his former self after some of his power was stolen by a mere mortal, another lost her sanity when she tried to rekindle the flames and is now the source of all demons (oh yeah, demons prowl this world too), and another sacrificed himself to a horrible burning existence to keep the flames going just a little longer. There's also no guarantee that either choice you make at the end of the game will make the world a better place for anyone.

Arguably even worse in its successors, as you learn that whatever you did didn't actually change anything. A somewhat alternative cycle of Empires exists where every Empire is first united by a good leader under which the the people flourish. Then, the Undead Curse returns and - while the leaders desperately try everything to stop it - a quick collapse is all but guaranteed. Naturally, all the games occur after said collapse.

Crisis City from Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) can be considered this as the entire city is on fire thanks to Iblis. This, in turn, causes Silver the Hedgehog and Blaze the Cat to turn to Mephiles and travel back to the past in an effort to save the future. Unfortunately, this involves the killing of Sonic the Hedgehog himself.

Whilst Mass Effect's future is pretty similar to the present, there are some pretty awful places to live: Omega and Tuchanka being the obvious ones, and territory controlled by the Batarian Hegemony is presumably not especially nice.

Things only get worse in the third game when the Reapers come knocking, especially on Earth. In the best possible endings, the galaxy at large overcomes this and moves on. In the worst possible endings, several species are wiped out and Earth in particular is a smoking cinder.

Armored Core depicted this kind of setting pretty early in the series, and has gotten worse with each new installment.

Armored Core V takes it up another level. The story starts out with the heroic rebels trying to overthrow Father, the resident dictator who controls a massive city that serves as the only real bastion of civilization in the region, which itself is cut off from the outside world by the after-effects of a massive war that polluted the land around it. Eventually Father gets overthrown, but immediately afterwards the Corporation comes in and starts wiping out the rebels. In the resulting chaos, the city is abandoned and the rebels wander aimlessly, breaking up into many groups of ever-warring migrants who are constantly claiming and losing territory in the never-ending war that serves as the multiplayer mode. So instead of a single totalitarian dictatorship that rules over a megacity, you end up with what is effectively Somalia. Withmecha.

The sequel Verdict Day up's the ante with having the "Somlia with mecha" and upping it to a global scale. This series doesn't catch a break, then again most games that FromSoftware make ever get one.

Armored Core 4 and For Answer may also qualify. The world is ruled by a series of various oppressive Mega Corps who wage war with each other for resources and influence, and has stables of pilots piloting their titular mechas which are equipped with weapons and shields that all the while corrode and poison the landscape. Taken to its literal extreme in For Answer where the only set of clean air on the planet is literally high up in the stratosphere, where many influential members of society reside while many of the soldiers and common folk waste away on the surface. To drive the point across, it's implied that the events of 4/For Answer occurred decades, maybe even centuries before V/Verdict Day.

In Epic Mickey the Wasteland that the story takes place has a very depressing appearance when we first see it. It use to be beautiful until Mickey Mouse created the Shadow Blot and spilled thinner onto the world, causing the beautiful features to be swept away. There are pools of thinner (acid-like chemical) surrounding certain areas and many areas are teaming with blot minions. Depending on the decisions the player makes, the Wasteland's depressing features can be minimal or dramatic. While it is true that for many structures, the player can use paint to make them look less gloomy, the sad features still exist beneath the paint.

Doom II: "Now you are the only Human left on the face of the planet. Cannibal mutations, carnivorous aliens, and evil spirits are your only neighbors…"

DOOM subtly implies this; apparently, the energy crisis has gotten so bad on Earth that the UAC is willing to mine Hell itself for Argent energy. Needless to say, it goes poorly - and it's implied that the Doomguy's destruction of the Argent energy processing facilities during the game have basically doomed the entire human race. Not thathe cares.

If you're a human in the God of War Series, you have two choices; Lawful Evilgods who view you as little more than a plaything or possession, and are only good in that they represent stability, or a Chaotic Evil demigod who's a Nominal Hero at best and might kill you for no other reason than he's having a bad day, which is often.

Apparently, crapsack worlds just arise naturally if you keep playing Civilization II for long enough. The year is 3991. Only three civilizations are left, and they're locked in a HopelessGuilt-Free Extermination War, and have been for the past 1700 years. The war has killed the vast majority of mankind (90% of people are dead), the polar ice caps have melted and nearly all of the earth's surface has been reduced to radioactive swampland where hardly anything ever grows, nuclear attacks on what's left of the cities are an almost daily occurrence (either from ICBMs or terror attacks), and all industrial capacity for all three nations is spent entirely on producing more munitions to fight on the frontlines, which haven't moved at all.

Evil Islands: Let's see. First, an After the End environment (Gipath) with ruins everywhere and people living in Stone Age. Second, an empire (Ingos) governed by The Caligula, and where just leaving the city means you'll get ruthlessly shot either by rioting villagers, the incredibly powerful gang of local thieves or the Private Army under orders from the local merchant. Finally, an empire (Suslanger) with basically no freedom, soldiers everywhere, and with legal slavery. What a happy world, don't you think?

DayZ simulates how a real life Zombie Apocalypse would go. Supplies are scarce, zombies are everywhere, and all the other players in the game will be more than happy to kill you just for your can of beans. The gameplay itself also lends itself to the trope quite well; firing guns will attract zombies and paranoid/rouge players towards you due to the noise, having your legs broken forces you to crawl everywhere and only morphine can fix broken bones, losing blood makes it hard to see or aim and losing too much blood can make you fall unconscious at random times, you have to keep eating and drinking to keep your energy up, and you never know if the other players helping you are going to back stab you later. Even being shot once is enough to break your bones or make you lose a ton of blood. Needless to say, only the strong survive and even they can't survive forever.

It is practically a Mercy Kill for the people of Midgard in the original Valkyrie Profile, because life there positively sucks compared to Asgard and the other roots of Yggdrasil. It's saturated with brown, with one of its leading powers constantly going on religious crusades, the other being an intense military force, loads and loads of poverty, child prostitution, monsters rampaging everywhere, constant political strife...a lot of this is displayed in only the first two chapters!

We eventually find out that several of the roots, including Midgard, are sustained by one of four great and powerful treasures; along with the three others, Midgard's treasure, the Dragon Orb, was stolen by Odin to be used during the battle of Ragnarok, and the after-effect pretty much turned Midgard into this trope.

Pretty much any title by Rockstar Games is going to be set in one, in addition to the previously mentioned titles like GTA and Max Payne. Heck, even Bully has shades of this.

Speaking of Bully; Bullsworth Academy. A school where all the students are separated into their own cliques which can't seem to get along with each other. Bullying has become such a rampant epidemic, to the point that campus guards march around the school all day. A simple infraction such as a dress code violation or being slightly late to class results in the school's prefects coming after you in mass numbers. The nearby town is not much better, with it's homelessness, regular theft and violence, and unfriendly townspeople.

The world of the Disciples games is a pretty Grim Dark place. Almost all of the gods are Jerkass Gods, the most sympathetic gods are the gods of the evil factions (the Satan expy was wrongfully accused and driven mad by imprisonment and the goddess of the undead is a Woman Scorned by an Ungrateful Bastard), and in the third game, the "good" gods want to destroy the world since they think it's a hopeless mess. The mortals aren't any better. The human Empire is falling apart due to the events of the games, the dwarves are in a similar bind, and the Elves become warmongers that turn on their former allies at the whim of a mad god. And these are the good guys. The bad guys are Omnicidal Maniac demons who want to free their wrongfully imprisoned master and the undead hordes are unflinchingly loyal to their goddess and don't care who they hurt while obeying her orders. The demons are also slowly dying because their master's power is fading. The only race that isn't really suffering are the Undead Hordes, because they are already dead. Nobody is wholly good, even evil isn't spared from suffering, and the only gods that think that resetting the world is a bad idea are the "evil" ones.

Messiah: Future Earth is ruled by dictators who freely snatch civilians off the streets to use them for genetic experiments or to feed their blood to the Sealed Evil in a Can. Police brutality is rampant and pretty much everyone carries a gun, to the point where shootouts on the streets between the cops and various armed factions are commonplace. Everything is drab and gray and polluted, and contact with nature is something that only the few lucky can afford. The only people who cared to rebel against the government have long since became savage cannibals who sometimes kidnap random people to eat them. Also, God doesn't care about humanity anymore.

Despite its cute looks, the world in Skullgirls is an utter hellhole. The world has just barely begun to recover from a cataclysmic war, and as a result much of the world is in ruins. There's a powerful Eldritch Abomination wandering the world, most sources of income are in debt to or controlled by a crime syndicate, the only safe country is a totalitarian state based on Nazi Germany, mad scientists can act with impunity (or worse, support), with horrifying abominations and killer robots rampaging across the land. and slavers are able to operate in the open.

BioShock has as its theme how the best-laid plans of men will collapse under contact with human failings. This is aptly illustrated by both Rapture, the crumbling, leaking city under the sea where anyone who's not insane is trying to use you, and Columbia, the flying city that regularly has pieces fall from the sky... which is probably a better fate for anyone on them than living in the city.

Fire Emblem has its fair share of worlds razed by war, but most of them either make due during the war or recover fine when the war is over. But Jugdral, as seen in Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776, is by far the worst of them all. Most of the ruling countries and houses in Jugdral are run by the descendants of twelve heroes. When the game starts, at least three of them are turning on the others, and by the second half of the game, all of the ruling houses are fighting amongst one another (which itself is lampshaded in the introduction to Chapter 8). The Herois ultimately duped by a man he thought was his ally, his father is blamed for the death of another lord (who turns out to be the father of his love interest), and he, along with most of his allies, are burned alive for treason. This all began because Sigurd merely wanted to a.) find some answers about why the Kingdom of Issach was invading Grannvale, and b.) he wanted to save Adean, a childhood friend, out of the goodness of his heart. By the second half of the game, while Arvis was able to keep a ten year peaceful rule, it all comes undone when both a number of nobles begin to fight again and when the Loptyr Cult starts acting out on its plans to revive the dark dragon god Loptyr, which is now possible because Arvis' son Julius has the blood needed to become his vessel. Needless to say, Arvis becomes regretful when Child Hunts and sacrifices become commonplace, and he even finds out that having Julius was a part of the cult's plan the entire time - they even brainwashed his half-sister so that she could marry him and have his children, as they both possess Loptyr's blood. Jugdral is also far more of a No Woman's Land compared to any other entry; in the second half of the game, it's implied that Leen/Laylea was raped by the nobleman she was serving because she refused to become his personal dancer. However, per the tradition of Fire Emblem, this is where the son of The Hero, Seliph, enter the fray and fight his way out to get rid of these problem and rebuild Jugdral to a better place, he usually succeeds to make it A World Half Full. But it doesn't take away the fact that Jugdral is hands down the darkest setting the franchise has ever offered.

The world of RuneScape: For starters, while none of the major deities are really evil, they're not exactly the nicest bunch of folks, and many of them think nothing of starting apocalyptic wars to expand their dominion, wipe other gods' followers out, or just for the sake of warfare. And that's just the gods; there's also:

A nation of Nigh Invulnerable vampires hellbent on expanding their rule over all of Gielinor, held in check by a tiny resistance movement and a blessed river (that they've almost managed to corrupt);

A clan of elves conspiring with the ruler of one of the largest human cities to bring Zamorak back into the physical plane of existence;

This threat has been resolved, and it turned out they actually weren't serving Zamorak, they were actually working for an evil fragment of the Elves' god, now destroyed. The restored elven city is now likely the nicest place to live in Gielinor thanks to the player's efforts.

Not one, but several holes in reality spewing hideous extradimensional monsters;

A race of draconian Humanoid Abominations known as the dragonkin, accidentally unleashed, empowered, and enraged by one of the Mahjarrat, who seek to annihilate all life on Geilinor.

Penguins are secretly intelligent and evil and planning to take over the human lands, but try to warn anybody about this and they will think you are crazy.

The Eastern Lands have tons of their own problems. Pirates, slavers, Fantastic Racism, natural disasters, corrupt rulers, sea monsters, and other threats are everywhere.

After the events of The World Wakes the Gods are now able to freely enter Geilinor again and an extremely dangerous Trickster possibly has gained godhood. When he shows up again he has managed to obtain the Stone of Jas which has the power to grant godhood or increase the power of a god but at the cost of making the dragonkin even more dangerous when it is used, and has offered it as a prize to the faction that kills the most gods, and so the apocalyptic god wars are likely to start again.

Due to the world no longer being protected from outside gods, the Airut, a race that uses a mindless god of destruction as a super weapon for destroying worlds so they can scavenge the remains, are preparing to invade.

However, some things have actually gotten better since these events. In the very first battle since the competition started, the most evil of the gods was killed by one of the nicest gods.

As far as post-nuclear wastelands go, the world of Metro 2033 and Last Light often makes Fallout look downright cozy. Just 20 years after the requisite nuclear war, humanity has literally been driven underground, with the surviving citizens of what used to be Moscow living their entire lives in the metro tunnels beneath the city. The very air of the surface is poisonous and radioactive, and every inch of the ruined city is infested with vicious, bloodthirsty, man-eating mutants that attack from land, sea, and air (and sometimes all at once). People are crowded into cramped, filthy train stations ruled by Nazis, Dirty Communists, or corrupt merchants' guilds, and life is generally a short, unpleasant slog in which death by mutants, bandits, radiation, or war seems almost inevitable. Oh, and there's no afterlife anymore; it, too, was destroyed when the bombs fell. Those who die end up as tortured souls trapped on Earth, unable to pass on and constantly reliving their final moments for eternity. Interestingly, it's telling that they're actually less crapsack-y than the books.

Mortal Kombat has Outworld: barren desert wastelands, pools of acid, and trees that feed on people are but some of the characteristics of Shao Kahn's realm. Subverted in Mortal Kombat X: with the new ruler Kotal Kahn focusing on protecting Outworld as opposed to his predecessor's preoccupation with conquering other realms, the realm has become much more habitable.

Earthrealm becomes this in Mortal Kombat 3 with Shao Kahn's invasion and the souls of every human, save a precious few protected by Raiden, snatched away as the realm is merged with Outworld. Also the case in Mortal Kombat 9 during the events of MK3, where military forces doing battle with demons and monsters is commonplace among the gradually crumbling cities.

Some of the other realms certainly qualify. There's a Lawful Stupid realm where All Crimes Are Equal and punished with Disproportionate Retribution, there's a Chaotic Stupid realm where everyone in it does whatever the hell they feel like (which is usually "murder each other for fun"), and then there's the Netherrealm which is basically Hell except it's where everyone, good or evil, goes when they die because there's no heaven. Not to mention, most of the gods are assholes and the ones that aren't so bad are also unfortunately too lazy to do anything.

In Xenonauts, you must stop an Alien Invasion before it causes too much damage to Earth powers. After each mishap, the game gives you a popup message about how the current UFO is messing with the world and terrorizing people, and these incidents only get worse and worse as the invasion progresses. (The designer specifically made this system to increase the feeling that you're fighting an escalating war and that the fate of mankind is at stake.)

Moreover, the Xenonauts and their support personnel all have uniformly unhappy expressions whenever you see them. (Wouldn't you?)

An example in a racing game of all places, Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit and its sequel Need for Speed: High Stakes have Empire City, a winding course through a decaying industrial sector and red light district. Described by the course narrator as a "Metropolis gone bad," it features rundown buildings, Gothic-esque architecture with glowing red windows, a seemingly ruined cityscape against a lighting-wracked, smog-reddened sky and a spherical space station staring at you◊.

The Dead Space universe is not a happy place for anyone except maybe the Brethren Moons. Humans have resorted to planet-cracking for resources. The government does terrible things out of sheer desperation to solve the energy crisis because planet-cracking isn't enough anymore. An insane cult that worships mysterious alien artifacts is gaining ground. Said artifacts inevitably drive people insane and transform them into flesh-eating Necromorphs. The government can't destroy/seal away said artifacts because they are the only possible solution they can find to the previously mentioned energy crisis. Said artifacts are nothing but Schmuck Bait to facilitate the Brethren Moons' lifecycle. The third game reveals that this awful situation has been repeated countless times with different alien civilizations. It's reflected in the games' environments as well. Everything looks dark and rusted, with the exception of the third game which takes place on an icy hellhole of a planet.

By the end of Awakened, the entire universe goes to hell now that the Brethren Moons begin to attack Earth and there is virtually nothing the protagonists can do.

Heavily implied in Tom Clancy's EndWar. A nuclear terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia has killed six million people and crippled the supply of oil from the Middle East, causing a massive worldwide financial crisis. Only the most powerful and wealthy countries survive; the United States (which has the funds and reserves to keep going), Russia (which has become the world's number one supplier of oil and gas now the Middle East has been crippled), and Europe (who have the technology to mass-produce hydrogen engines), and some independent countries like Britain, Switzerland and Israel have managed to keep going but most others couldn't sustain themselves and collapsed. The United Nations has been disbanded due to massive diplomatic disputes, China's gone to pot and is plagued by environmental disasters, Africa and India are experiencing droughts which are killing tens of thousands, and the Balkans have descended into complete anarchy. And thenWorld War III kicks off.

Zalanthas is one through and through. The world has a desert climate, with wildlife that is extremely dangerous and aggressive, with metal being so scarce that any survival gear has to make do without it. The centres of civilisation that do exist are all invariably ruled by autocrats, corrupt officials, and packed with scores of thieves and criminals. To top it all off, the resident pair of sorceror-kings running the most powerful cities out there are heavily implied to be directly related to the world's crapsack state.

In Emerald City Confidential, Oz is run-down and riddled with crime and corruption, magic has been outlawed, and Oz is at threat from attack by the Phanfasms, since Oz's magical protection is out-of-balance due to the death of the four witches.

Mine Craft. Just about every humanoid thing is out to kill you along with every humanoid thing that isn't you that doesn't want to kill you. The only peaceful people live in constant fear of a zombie attack and the player themselves can never outright exterminate the plague of undead.

The world of Dishonored fits this trope to a tee. Civilization as we know it exists only on a handful of small islands in the middle of a mostly unexplored ocean on a world that's implied to have been created entirely by accident and that humanity is rapidly bringing it closer to its destruction. There's one other continent, but it's so inhospitable that every settlement quickly goes mad and/or dies. Virtually everything in this world can and does kill humans, with giant vicious rats that carry a horrible plague and can reduce a human to nothing in seconds, acid-spitting river krusts that infest the shores, giant Lovecraftian horrors that only vaguely resemble real whales and are implied to have magic powers, and wolfhounds with crocodile jaws. In Dunwall, it's just as bad; the city is crumbling, half the population is dead to plague, and it's run by a corrupt and crazy dictatorship with an oppressive police and strict religion. Depending on your actions, you can make it slightly worse, doom it for eternity, or lead it into a golden age.

It says something of the crapsack nature of the setting that there are two alternatives for the afterlife. Those who live discordant lives have their spirits wander the The Void until they're devoured by...something. Those who live lives not dominated by discordance are "blessed" with fading.

Phoenotopia subverts this; the ancient humans who went to space expected Earth to be stuck as one after the war, but it got better. Played straight in the Dread Lands.

The protagonist monologue in the trailer for Hatred seems to set this tone for the game. Then again, seeing that the protagonist is a Straw NihilistDeath Seeker about to go on a mass murdering rampage, this may just be his worldview.

Even though we don't see anything outside the pizzeria, the world of "Five Nights at Freddy's" is heavily implied to be a terrible world due to the following reasons:

Animatronics that are powerful enough to carry a teenage/adult human and stuff him into a suit, (in the eighties, or possibly earlier). If these animatronics are this powerful in 1987, it would be more terrifying to see them in the future.

Someone being heartless enough to kill at least eleven children.

The business decisions of the pizzeria's manager, including but not limited to not reporting any missing/dead security guards, and not fixing the robots so they don't attack anyone else.

Grimsborough in Criminal Case Season 1. Aside from Always Murder which is the game's main theme, there's also a lot of gang warfare and mob rivalry going on in Grimsborough, at least one Dirty Cop has affected the Grimsborough P.D., and the rich care more about their money and status than about the feelings or welfare of others.

Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus take place in a world completely controlled by Nazis for fourteen years. And hoo boy, it does not shy away from showing exactly how horrifying a world like that would be. The media is completely state-controlled, conscription is mandatory, mass killings are regular, the most powerful man in the Reich regards human vivisection as fun...to describe all its sins would fill up half the page. Its Establishing Character Moment is the main character waking up in the asylum to find a gang of Nazis abducting recovering patients for the purpose of using them for human experimentation, then shooting the largely-unarmed asylum staff for trying to protect their charges. Some other highlights from this world include the following.

The United States is firmly under the Nazi's thumb. New York is a radioactive wasteland after the Nazis dropped an atom bomb on it, New Orleans is a massive walled ghetto where people are left to fend for themselves, chattel slavery has been reintroduced, The Klan is free to walk the streets, propaganda can be found absolutely everywhere, and the people have gradually begun to normalize Nazi ideology. Oh, and after July 4, 1961, speaking English will be outlawed and earn you an immediate execution.

The crapsackiness of this world isn't even confined to Earth. The Nazis have created a Space Base on the Moon, where they store their nuclear launch codes, have a literal army of space marines, and are planning to build an escape-proof labor camp with robotic guards. The second game reveals they've also built one on Venus.

Watch_Dogs. Even beyond the already spooky notion of a nigh-omniscientoperating system, the incidence of crime in Chicago is VERY high, with major subplots surrounding serial killers, gangs, human trafficking, gun-running, and more. And that's not even getting into the Profiler and Privacy Invasion mechanics, which open up whole galaxies of this by allowing the player glimpses into the lives of just about everyone they meet, and the results are almost uniformly dark: frequenters of racist blogs, deadbeat husbands, long-suffering mothers, irresponsible fathers, drug addicts, disease victims, and even an HIV-positive blood donor, among many others.

The world as depicted in Bayonetta and its sequel falls pretty firmly under its umbrella. Reality is split into three realms; Earth, Inferno and Paradiso. The denizens of Inferno are demons, who regard humans as nothing but resources, seeking to harvest their souls by slaughter or pact and consume those souls to increase their own power. Even the Umbra Witches, who make pledges with demons for Black Magic that they use as The Sacred Darkness, do so knowing full well that their inevitable fate is to be utterly annihilated to empower whatever demon manages to ingest their soul after they die, a fate so terrible that all witches are sealed inside special tombs to spare their living sisters the pain of acknowledging it. On the other side, there's the Angels of Paradiso... who are actually nightmarish Eldritch Abominations who try to look more appealing by covering their multiple eyes, dripping red flesh and other inhuman aspects in marble, gold and gems, and who are absolutely no different to demons in regards to their opinions about and uses for humans. Oh, and did we mention that ordinary humans can't see either of them and certainly can't hurt them, as they're effectively immune to non-magical weapons?

In Strider 2, the world is on the verge of a cataclysmic annihilation, suffering from overpopulation, constant wars and polution, all of which has led to the destruction of the environment and the spread of chronic diseases and genetic mutations. The world governments are part of a Nebulous Evil Organisation and are corrupt to the core, funding crime groups and amoral pharmaceutical organizations while letting crimes (and suicide) rates skyrocket. Transhumanism is in full vogue, with people willingly getting cybernetic implants, genetic surgery or enhancing drugs. The early stages in the game are a window into this world (the first stage, for example, shows Hong Kong having turned into an overblown megacity for the rich, while the poor had to make a living in the ruins of the old city, underground.)

The 2014 Strider is only marginally better, although we don't really get to see the world outside Kazakh City. The city itself, however, has become a massime overpoblated and poluted complex ruled over by General Mikiel, a madman who demands perfection and full obedience from is subjects under threat of incarceration or even execution. Citizens live under constant martial law, are forced into labor and have very strict curfew times. Those trying to escape are faced with the possibility of being killed or, worse yet, captured alive to serve as guinea pigs in the research facility. Even those who manage to escape the city can only go to the nether regions of the city, where survivors live in hidden imporvished towns suffering from constant hunger and attacks from mutant Big Creepy-Crawlies lurking around.

Crysis: Alcatraz describes that the world apparently became like this in the years between 2010-2020. There were a couple of economic crashes (the "Double Dip"), multiple wars in Asia and South America, new epidemics (at least one of them weaponized by Egypt against Syria in the "Water Wars") and a number of Secession Riots in Texas, which were quelled with Marine deployment. Things are so bad that the USA is under a DHS-enforced media-blackout, cellphone restriction and a No-Fly zone, all of them voted into long-term law. As for the rest of the world, we literally don't know what is happening after the Ceph awakened.

In Legion Watts points out that the Ceph's cryogenic weapon would set off environmental catastrophes worldwide - which corrupt governments were able to spin into Soviet Russia-level authoritarianism. Ceph hives are slowly waking up, causing city-smashing earthquakes. And on top of that, bioterrorism is a growing concern - Alcatraz compares the Ceph bioweapon to enhanced necrotizing fasciitis that somebody turned loose in the Middle East to defend the pipelines.

Just in case anyone thought that there was a chance that humanity might be able to match the Ceph directly, that prospect is thoroughly dashed in Crysis 3, where it's made clear that the Ceph are billions of years old, utter masters at adaptation to any environment in the galaxy, and have colonized millions of planets across multiple spiral arms of our galaxy alone. Also, the Ceph's tech is so far beyond humanity's that the Ceph that humanity has been fighting are their equivalent of cavemen with clubs.

The world of Yu-Gi-Oh! BAM was devastated by a great and deadly battle, leaving little but memories of previous duels in its wake. The first city, Alba Litora, is a bleak, dreary city that was shattered in time.

The Halo universe is pretty damn bleak. Devastating conflicts erupt cyclically among (and within) the various species that inhabit the galaxy, as apparently none of them are very good at the "peace" thing. Their precursors occasionally pop up and screw things up even worse. A sentient, omnicidal parasite with unknown origins regularly threatens the galaxy (and is, in fact, the only entity that occasionally manages to cause the others to go "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and initiate shaky truces). And to top it all off, there doesn't really seem to be any way of permanently destroying the parasite, with the closest anyone's come to sterilization being a system that kills all sentient creatures in the galaxy. This system has been used before, resulting in unconceivable life loss, but being that the parasite is so virulent that a single remnant creature is enough to generate another galaxywide infestation even such extreme measures only give the galaxy temporary respite. The games begin as the parasite is wreaking havoc yet again, and with one of the two major groups in the galaxy waging brutal war against the other based on a mistranslation. Even after the parasite is stopped and the war ends, the galaxy is not really in much better shape; there may be no big official war, but there are lots of smaller ones, with some nasty characters taking advantage of the chaos for their own ends.

The Secret World in which All Myths Are True, and most of them are nothing short of nightmarish. Even before you start getting into the grisly history behind the locations you visit, it’s pretty clear that the entire world is dominated by various secret societies with highly suspect motives, the playable factions consisting of the ultra-conservative but well-intentioned Templars, the power-hungry but pragmaticIlluminati, and the chaos-mathematician terrorist group known as the Dragon. All three have done some pretty unpleasant things in their time, but because the Council of Venice is too hamstrung by corruption and bureaucracy to get anything done and all the other societies are too preoccupied with their own petty struggles, the Big Three are probably the only factions capable of saving the world… and all of them have their work cut out for them: a Zombie Apocalypse in New England, the return of the Black Pharaoh and the Aten in Egypt, a vampire army amassing in the Carpathian Mountains, a death cult detonating a Filth-bomb on the Tokyo subways, a supernaturally-owned corporation moving to harness the setting’s Cosmic Keystone with disastrous results, and the Dreaming Ones poised to awaken from their slumber and destroy everything. And for a final cherry on the doom sundae, the only thing that can prevent the End of Days are the Gaia Engines – the aforementioned Cosmic Keystone: most of the time, they act as music boxes lulling the Dreamers to sleep and keeping the Filth from building to dangerous levels, but if something apocalyptic does occur, they channel the power of the Dreamers into hitting the Reset Button on the entire planet. Unfortunately, this has happened three times already, and a fourth time might just be impossible...

Pillars of Eternity. Eora is not a nice place. Racism, classism, and religious intolerance are prevalent. An ethnic cleansing of non-believers took place during the Leaden Key inquisition, while the Eothasians are slaughtered in retaliation for the Saint's war and Waidwen's legacy. Meanwhile, the hollowborn epidemic is causing many babies to be born withoutsouls, which has put the nation of dyrwood's population in danger of collapse. Attempts to remedy this situation included giving them animal souls. This worked at first...but caused the children to transform into animalisitic monsters called wichts when they hit puberty.

In Tyranny, the war in which Kyros the Overlord rose to power certainly didn't do the world any favours. Some parts of it may have been like this even before; one region is described as having been "ruined and depopulated by constant war" such that it has been largely abandoned for centuries.

We Happy Few takes place in an alternate Britain where the USA never joined World War II on Britain's side, resulting in the Nazis commencing Operation Sea Lion, and against all odds the operation succeeded. Desperate to turn the tide, Britain did... something, something very bad to the Germans which was apparently so horrific that the surviving British populace turned to voluntary Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul to avoid societal collapse from the sheer guilt. No word on the rest of the world but it's heavily implied that there's not very much left of it.

The Under the Burning Suns campaign in Battle for Wesnoth is set in a barren and desolate world where the days are scorching hot and the nights are hauntingly cold, the surface is largely overrun by constantly warring orc tribes and roving hordes of undead, and the civilisations of elves and men have long-since collapsed leaving bands of scattered survivors to move between ghost towns. Things aren't much better for the dwarves and trolls, who have evaded the sun's wrath but are locked in a brutal Forever War with each other. The sequel makes things even more crapsack by adding Cyborg alien invaders and the demons of hell.

Thanks to the main character's actions in the previous game, the world in Shadow Warrior 2 is a mess. The mortal world has been corrupted by malevolent forces, basically a sort of inter-dimensional hernia. This means that the world is constantly changing and occasionally demons will leak out into the world and attack people. There are some Cyberpunk "Safe Cities" where the demons can't go, but this safety comes at a price: living in them throws you at the mercy of the Mega Corp. which runs them, which will control just about every aspect of your life and exploit you for profit. According to Lo Wang in the trailer, the world doesn't even want to be saved, the presence of demons having brought out all of mankind's worst aspects which they now revel in.

Master of Magic: Myrror is a great source of magical power for any wizard who exploits it, but it's also a hellish place to live. The five races of Myrror are utterly inimical to one another, most of them are rather nasty and vicious in nature, raiders and wandering monsters are far more dangerous than on Arcanus, and the various places of power tend to be inhabited by some really nasty customers. Even the colors are different: Arcanus looks like your generic brightly-colored fantasy world, Myrror's terrain is mostly shades of blue and violet.

Streets of Rogue takes place in one. Put simply, the government is corrupt, average people are less than helpful in general, the resistance, which the player is part of, is only marginally better than the government, although at least it seems to care just not always enough to do something about all the problems.

The Witcher: Where to begin? Most people are peasants drudging through life in crippling poverty and neglect, religious intolerance reigns supreme, Fantastic Racism sees elves, dwarves and magic users treated as second-class citizens, nobles spend all their time oppressing their own citizens or backstabbing each other, kings driven by shameless greed and hubris lead men to wars of rape and pillage, the ominous shadow of The Empire hangs over everyone's heads, all kinds of monsters prowl the wilderness, elven terrorists roam around attacking people, and if that wasn't enough prophecy says the world and everything in it will be obliterated by a magical ice age.

The End Is Nigh, oh boy, The End Is Nigh. Before the game, the Earth was destroyed in a nuclear war, killing almost everything and leaving the few remaining creatures permanently charred and horribly mutated, with most of them not even sentient. However, a small number of things that humans made, most notably the Machine and the SS Exodus still are intact. Until Hell opens up about halfway through the game, destroying almost everything else and releasing thousands of tortured souls. And if you think things get better at the end? Ash's friend sets off another nuke.

If you wake up as a player character in Nexus Clash and aren't a Blood Knight, your life has taken a permanent turn for the worse, since you're trapped in one apocalyptic battlefield after another, killing and being killed to decide the fate of the next world. Even the end of the world and the birth of the next one doesn't end it, since as a soul caught in the Nexus, you sleep through the entire life of the world and wake up at its end in the next apocalyptic battlefield. There's a World Half Full aspect in that winning the war can cause life in the new world to be happy and peaceful, but even if you fight for the side of good, you never get to live in the positive worlds that you've helped to come into existence.

The New Order Last Days of Europe. And how. An unreleased Game Mod for Hearts Of Iron 4 where Nazi Germany handily won World War II... and lost the peace. Germany itself is victorious but internationally isolated from its former fascist Italian and Spanish allies (after the failure of the Atlantropa project) and facing economic ruin. England is occupied, Free France is still clinging to West Africa, the Soviet Union is a distant memory and Russia is now split between various feuding mercenary warlords pushing every ideology under the sun, and if that wasn't enough, not only is a nuclear holocaust quite likely but Heinrich Himmlier (who now controls Ordenstaat Burgundy and has gone so far off the deep-end that he considers Nazi Germany to be too far left) actively plans for this to happen (in the name of exterminating the entire planet of undesirables and allowing the Aryans to repopulate).

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